


first love / late spring

by vowelinthug



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Tenderness, recreational podcasting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:14:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21889495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vowelinthug/pseuds/vowelinthug
Summary: Between the two of them, Richie and Eddie have never had: an ounce of chill, good timing, or a single productive therapy session. So why start now?__Post-movie domesticity, alone in the woods.Because the thing about stories is, we accept the endings we think we deserve. Or they deserve. Or something.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 160
Kudos: 1504





	first love / late spring

**Author's Note:**

> hello, i thought i was just dipping my toes into writing reddie to see how it felt and instead i plunged directly into 36,000+ depths

The thing about comedy is — it’s about timing.

Like, _academically_ , that’s in the formula. Comedy = tragedy + time.

Maybe that’s why Richie’s such a shitty comedian. He couldn’t remember any of his major tragedies. He definitely did his best to make up for that in college and the years after, with a vast and unique array of assorted fuck-ups, disappointments, and extreme acts of humility. But it’s not the same. That stuff isn’t far enough away yet, and without a solid base coat of trauma, he didn’t stand a chance at being funny.

All he had was a strong urge to be funny, to make people laugh, to entertain, without the material. It had felt like drowning, or like hunger. Like a person standing in front of you, waiting for the right combination of words to be convinced to stay, and you just can’t find them.

Anyway, Richie has the material now.

Currently, he’s in the Deadlights.

They never asked Bev what she saw when she went in. Not for details. They were kids. Follow up questions are too much like homework. Anyway they would have just fucking forgotten the answers.

Richie sees only his own future in the Deadlights. It’s pretty bleak, but like. Neat trick, Pennywise, but Richie could have told you that. A shallow, unremarkable career, unsurprisingly. A spiral into depression and a descent into alcoholism, not exactly where he’s at right now but an obvious trajectory for any comedian. Alienating what few friends he has and losing his money in bad investments, of course. Bald? Richie’s seen that one coming for years now, please.

Celibacy? That one actually sucks.

Not that he’s been exactly a Casanova recently, but he’s never been _this_ bad. Surely, _someone_ wants to fuck the guy who forgot his own name on stage and buried a hatchet into someone’s skull, at least for the novelty of it.

But nope.

Richie’s just getting ready to watch his old, bald, fat self stick his head in an oven when he’s shaken awake by a blow to the back of the head.

The blow is caused by the floor. He’s lying on his back. Eddie is on top of him, not looking pissed, for once.

Comedy is about timing, because if a joke isn’t timed exactly right, if you don’t stick that landing perfectly, like a gymnast, you’ll break your fucking ankle on the balancing beam or whatever the fuck and fall flat on your face and your whole career is over.

Richie has great comedic timing. It’s how he’s had any career at all, how he can read material that isn’t his and get a laugh.

So he supposes it’s with an ironic kind of comedic timing — ironic on that it’s truly the _worst_ fucking timing — that, with blood and sewage slime and gray water covering _everything,_ and a demonic alien spider clown dancing around his friends nearby, and with the vision of his sad sack celibate self living a life of isolation and liver disease juxtaposed against Eddie’s smiling face in the dark — that Richie reaches up, cups Eddie gently by his disfigured cheek, and pulls him down for a kiss.

The thing about Eddie is — he’s the only one who could ever keep up with Richie.

For better or worse.

Sitcoms call it _banter._ Sam and Diane. That bullshit. Like an old married couple, or whatever. It’s embarrassing, in the last day or so, remembering suddenly how he and Eddie had been, how fucking _obvious_ Richie had been in retrospect. If they weren’t chasing or running from It he would have jumped off the kissing bridge as soon as his memories started coming back.

But everyone knows Richie never shuts up. No one thinks that about Eddie. That’s not what _he’s_ known for. But the truth is — around Richie, Eddie never shuts the fuck up. Everyone else was always content to ignore Richie or throw him a _beep, beep_ to stop him from talking. But Eddie was like an actual insane person — doing the same thing over and over and expecting a new result. Eddie’s lifelong mission had been working towards ensuring that Richie never, ever had the last word. Every joke, every action, every face, every Voice had to be met with equal parts aggression and encouragement. Because nothing got Richie louder than Eddie.

So of course, when Richie kisses him, Eddie immediately kisses back. There’s not even a little bit of hesitation, of wondering _really? Here? Now? You want this?_ Just suddenly, lips pushing against his, a hand angrily fisting his dirty, disgusting, full head of hair. He’s toe to toe with Richie like always, giving as good as he gets.

Behind them, a blood-curdling scream. The sound of something crashing, or exploding. A cry of agonizing pain. Eddie’s teeth against his bottom lip, his knee slipping between Richie’s legs. It’s pretty much exactly how Richie pictured his first kiss with Eddie to be.

And because Richie knows Eddie pretty well, even after all this time, and he just _knows_ this’ll be a Thing for him, he starts to roll them over so Richie is on top. And just like he expected, Eddie immediately starts to push back to remain above him, kissing him with equal parts aggression and encouragement.

And that’s when the big claw comes in.

Because the thing about It is — while It is a big fucking alien that’s the incarnation of all things evil and cruel and awful in the world, It’s also a clown.

Clowns have great comedic timing.

For a moment, all of Richie’s discomfort is just the weight of Edward Kaspbrak on his hips and a small rock digging into his spine, and then it shifts to blinding pain shattering through his shoulder like smashed glass. Richie feels Eddie’s gasp on his lips, but he can’t get a good look at him, or at the claw that is piercing through Eddie’s shoulder and into Richie.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Eddie groans, resting his forehead on Richie’s. They are pinned together like a taxidermied butterfly. His fingernails dig so sharply into Richie’s scalp they probably draw blood, but it hardly matters because at least they’re not a giant fucking _claw._

“This,” says Richie weakly, when he can speak, squeezing his eyes shut, “isn’t the kind of penetration I was expecting after making out with you.”

“I’m going to kill you,” says Eddie, but it almost sounds like he’s talking to himself. Then the claw starts to pull out.

It stops.

It tugs again.

It stops again.

It’s caught on Richie.

“Shoulda—” Richie coughs, but he’s getting this out if it’s the last thing he does. “ — shoulda used lube, asshole...”

Eddie groans and It shrieks. Richie feels almost euphoric at their shared disdain. This is such a better way to die than sticking his head in an oven.

One final tug and the claw rips free of them both. Richie feels hot all over, from their shared blood spilling freely from them and also Eddie’s weight collapsing fully on him. His face falls somewhere in Richie’s uninjured side, and Richie is just fine to lie there for a minute, thanks. Except the rigor needed to pull Itself free of their bodies caused the claw to slam into the ceiling above them. Richie has just enough time to think, _huh those rocks are closer than before,_ before grabbing Eddie and rolling them away like a cartoon tumbleweed.

The two of them _fuck shit FUCK fuck jesus shit CHRIST RICHIE fuckfuckFUCK_ down a tunnel, away from the clown spider, away from their friends, finally coming to a stop via slamming directly into a boulder while the ceiling caves in exactly where they’d just been kissing.

“Fuck!” Eddie says one more time, fingers digging sharply into Richie’s spine. “I’m going to puke all over you.”

Except Richie is on top now. “You’re going to puke all over yourself,” he points out. “And die just like Mama Cass. Didn’t your mom really like her?”

“Go fuck yourself,” says Eddie, but he hasn’t let go of Richie. He says it like a reflex, like how you say _oh I’m fine, you?_ when someone asks how you are. Eddie hears _your mom_ out of Richie’s mouth and it’s an immediate _go fuck yourself._

They look over to where they’d just been lying. It’s now a full wall of stone, muffling the sounds of fighting and screaming.

“I like the Mamas and the Papas,” Richie mumbles, staring at the wall. “Fuckin’ _California Dreamin_ ’ and —”

“Oh my god, can I fucking die already? Please?” Eddie slowly uncurls his death grip on Richie’s shirt. “Go see if there’s a way through.” He pushes him towards the new wall.

“Me? I just got stabbed.”

“Yeah and I got stabbed _twice_ , I have _two_ holes now — no, shut the fuck up, Richie, I swear to God —”

Richie, not feeling very generous now, thinks it should still only count as _one_ stabbing even if it resulted in two holes, but Eddie is very pale and bleeding a shitton of blood. Richie is bleeding a lot too, but looking at Eddie’s face, chin resting on his chest where he’s slumped on this dirty fucking ground, his eyes wide and desperately begging Richie to not shut the fuck up, actually, to keep talking, to keep joking, because he is seconds from losing it again. Richie hadn’t thought it possible to feel fear stronger than pain, but he could have just asked Eddie that and he would have given him the answer, which is, absolutely.

Richie shuts the fuck up. He mistakenly leans against the side of the tunnel with his bad side and nearly blacks out, but he’s nearly blacked out almost every single time he’s stood up on a stage, and he’s always able to power through it. He stumbles over to the wall, and with what minimal strength he has, he pushes.

Nothing moves. What was once a shitty, crumbling ceiling, caving under an errant spider claw, is now a pretty fucking sturdy wall.

“Bill!” he shouts, slapping his palms uselessly against the stone. “Bev! Hey! Anyone!”

He finds a gap in the rocks, too small to even fit a hand through, just as Bill appears on the other side.

“Richie!” he gasps. “I t-t-thought you were dead.”

“Bitch, I might be.” Richie sticks what few fingers he can get in through the hole, and his knees nearly give out at the feeling of Bill’s wet, warm hand gripping them. “Eddie’s here, too, we’re both hurt. Him more so, I guess, the drama queen. We can’t get through.”

“N-no,” says Bill, and a sudden shriek cuts him off. “J-j-just get out of here! Get him to a hospital! Go!”

“What the fuck, we’re not just going to leave you guys!”

“I think we should leave them,” Eddie says weakly behind him. “I vote hospital.”

“Stick a couple corks in your holes, Eds, we’ll find a way around.”

“ _No._ ” Richie can’t see him, but he can _hear_ Big Bill loud and clear, and even though Richie is over fucking forty, he still thinks _Bill sounds like a grownup_. He recognizes it now as Bill the storyteller, which is essentially Bill the God, commanding, sure of all the moving parts and everybody’s role, insistent that the story follows through the way he’s designed. “Get out of here, we’ll find you. I think I know what to do now. Please, Richie, _go._ We’ll meet you at the hospital.” And then he’s gone.

Richie bends down to peer into the gap in the wall, but it’s only dark. And it’s so much worse — just hearing the fight and imagining. He stumbles back over to Eddie, feeling blood dripping down his right arm. It’s slowly starting to feel like dead weight, from his neck all the way down to his fingertips.

“Alright, up and at em, Spaghetti,” Richie says, and with as much dignity as they could muster, which isn’t a ton, they finally get Eddie standing. They only have one way to go in this tunnel, so it’s really, really, very possible they’re just dragging each other to a dark and miserable death or starvation or suffocation or bleeding out in the depths of that fucking house on Neibolt street. Or, equally possible, they’re heading towards safety.

“ _Monday, Monday, so good to me_ ,” Richie murmurs in completely the wrong tune, landing each syllable with a heavy step. They’re walking towards water — it’s up to their ankles now. That could be a good sign. Or it could mean drowning is their surprise death of choice. “ _Monday mornin’, it was all I’d hope it would be_.”

“Oh my god,” says Eddie, head resting limply on Richie’s good shoulder. “It’s fucking Thursday, man.”

When Richie was just starting on the stand-up scene, still in New York, he’d had a friend, another comedian and performer but ten times funnier than Richie would ever be, who’d gotten sick. Capital S sick. The friend had been wasting away, and had refused all visitors nearer to the end. So Richie used to call him, and do whatever Voice that was requested. Cher and Alan Alda and Bill Clinton and Sylvester Stalone, all calling to cheer his friend up and tell him to get better soon. His friend hadn’t, but Richie liked to think the Voices helped in whatever way they could.

“Hey, what Voice do you want me to do?” Richie asks Eddie, readjusting his grip around his waist as the water hits their knees. “It’ll distract you, c’mon.”

But Eddie shakes his head, the top of his head brushing Richie’s chin. “Just want to hear you,” he says quietly. And while Richie’s heart is still rocketing around his chest at that revelation, Eddie says, “Next time you fucking kiss me, you’re not gonna swallow a mouthful of fucking sewage water first.”

“Okay,” says Richie, the throbbing in his shoulder now — everywhere. There’s more water and also, maybe, a light. Then, “Next time?”

* * *

Richie doesn’t remember how he got them to the hospital. Which, it’s a good thing Eddie was thoroughly unconscious by the time they made it out of the sewer, because Richie definitely drove them there.

He’d staggered into the emergency room, dragging Eddie by one arm over his shoulder, the two of them looking like they’ve just auditioned for a remake of _Carrie_ and didn’t get callbacks. He’d shouted, “ _He’s got two holes!_ ”

Several nurses had taken Eddie away. Richie might have wrestled a few of them in confusion, suddenly afraid to be parted. But then the nurses noticed he, too, had a hole in his shoulder, and then they’d also whisked him away, although in the opposite direction.

Richie, finally, let them. He lets them hose him down. He lets them stitch him up and take x-rays and give him more blood. He lets them stick him in a sling and a hospital gown with his ass hanging out for all to see. He stops them from putting him in a bed. He can’t lie down. If he lies down, there’s no getting up again.

And he’s waiting on his friends.

Fortunately, the hospital in Derry is pretty small, and most people in this shitty town are either living or dead, with no _dying_ in between, so Richie gets his own room. He has no idea where Eddie is, but a nurse just tells him the doctor is still with him. It makes sense he’s taking longer. He had twice the number of holes as Richie had.

 _You’re an asshole,_ he thinks, pacing around his tiny sterile room, death grip on an IV pole. _You’re an asshole you’re an asshole you’re an asshole you just LEFT them you’re such an asshole_

But Richie’s nurse looks at him like he knows it’s a close-call for Eddie, who could actually lose the arm, who could actually have bled out, who could actually have just died if Richie had taken more time to argue with Bill. It had been the right thing to do, getting him out of there are quickly as possible.

But he still feels like an asshole.

Richie has no idea how long he’s been here. He has no idea how long he was in the sewers. Time has lost all meaning. It’s gray out the window, one of those overcast days where it’s impossible to tell if it’s morning or afternoon.

He wonders how much time has to pass for tragedy to turn to comedy. He goes into the small bathroom for a change of scenery. Turning on the lights is a big mistake, but mistakes are his _raison_ fucking _d’etre._

He looks pale. He looks _old._ He swears he hadn’t been old until he’d answered Mike’s call. He’d been stupid, which must mean he was young a week ago, because he’s too fucking old to have been that stupid.

_They all know now. They saw they know you’re such an asshole you fucking pervert while they were dying they know and you’re an asshole_

Distantly, Richie catalogues the panic on his face, the tick in his shadowed jaw, his eyes wide and red behind his cracked glasses. They probably didn’t see shit. It was dark. A monster was trying to murder them at the time. It’s fine. He’s safe.

A giggle slips out of his lips, and he immediately clenches his mouth with one hand, his skin whitening where he’s pressing down.

Eddie knows. He definitely knows

_I wonder if I gave him beard burn._

Another laugh he clamps down hard in his chest. _You’re such an asshole._ It’s too soon for tragedy to become comedy. His friends might all be dead, and his career is probably tanked, and oh yeah he _killed a guy yesterday and was his body even found yet?_

Okay, that one he lets himself laugh at, because it’s just so stupidly fucking absurd he almost thinks it had to be another Pennywise trick. Him, Trashmouth Tozier, who can’t even throw a party let alone a fist, who once nearly got arrested trying to steal a police horse at an anti-Bush administration protest in his twenties because he thought it looked sad, who has an unironic peace symbol tattooed on his left butt cheek for reasons he doesn’t really remember — weak, soft Trashmouth — a murderer.

Absurd.

Outside his room, there’s a bang and someone yelling, and then the sound of multiple footsteps. Even though Richie is standing completely still in front of the tiny hospital sink, he still manages to almost slip in his specifically non-slip hospital socks in surprise.

His first thought is, _my ass is fully hanging out right now._ Then he thinks, _my friends are here._ Then he thinks, _your friends are dead._ Then he thinks, _the Derry police are here to arrest you for MURDER._ Then he thinks, _It is back._ Then he thinks, _Eddie is dead._

It’s the last thought that gets him moving. He either needs to see it isn’t true or run as fast as he can in the opposite direction to avoid the truth, his ass flapping in the breeze.

But when he opens the door, he almost runs right into a nurse, who is keeping Mike still, who is supporting Ben, whose leg looks very painfully broken and who is getting his back rubbed by a bloody, beautiful Bev. And behind them all, as always, is Bill. They are surrounded by a gaggle of nurses.

“ _Rich!”_ Mike yells over all their heads. He can’t let go of Ben yet, but the look on his face is one Richie will dream about for the rest of his life. An unfiltered beacon of relief and concern and love shining right on him.

It’s happening. He’s been fine even when they were fixing his arm (relatively speaking). He’s been fine since they left him alone in his room (sort of). Okay, maybe not _fine,_ but keeping it together.

At the sight of the other Losers, his legs give out from under him.

And Bill, with ten feet and a herd of nurses and Mike and an injured Ben in his path, somehow manages to catch him before he hits the ground.

“It’s okay, Rich,” says Bill softly, holding him up and easing him into a chair in the hallway. “W-we did it, we got It.”

Richie starts to cry. He knocks his own glasses off to try and hide it in his hands, but everyone knows. Everyone sees.

Tentatively, leaning close, Bill asks, “Eddie?”

Richie shrugs, and then groans in pain. He takes a deep breath and says, still staring at the floor, “I don’t know yet. They — they took him awhile ago, he was unconscious.”

“Okay,” says Bill, sounding slightly relieved, rubbing his back like Bev is for Ben. “He’ll be okay.”

A gurney comes for Ben, and while the nurses get him quickly situated, Bev comes over and cups Richie’s face, forcing it up. He still has his glasses off, but she looks clear as always. She brushes a kiss to his forehead. “You did great, Richie.” She looks like she wants to say more, but stops herself, again leaning down to rest her lips on his head.

The nurses start to wheel Ben away. To Bev, Richie says, “You better go with him. These nurses are wild animals, they’re going to cut away his jeans to fix his leg and when they see what’s under there, we’ll never see Ben again.”

“Beep, beep, Richie,” Ben says as he passes, leg broken in a million places but still managing to blush.

Bev smooths down Richie’s hair once, even though he is now significantly cleaner than she is, and smiles, before following Ben. Mike is trying to fight another nurse, who wants to look over all of them. She’s two feet shorter than him and winning.

“Mike,” Richie says, and when he gets his attention, he mouths, “ _Bowers.”_

Mike frowns over the nurses head, and then he _frowns._ “Oh shit. I need a phone. Miss, may I use a phone?”

The nurse gives him an evil eye. “I need to sterilize you first. Were you all playing in a sewer or somethin?”

“Playing? No.” He doesn’t wait for her before taking off towards the nearest desk.

“Some little old lady librarian is going to find the body I left behind,” Richie says, and then places his whole head between his knees. He breathes for a moment and then says, “It’s a little weird you rubbing my back through the opening in this gown, man.”

Bill stops rubbing but doesn’t lift his hand. “It’s a little weird you’re b-b-bare-assed on this chair, Richie.”

Richie nods his head, because he’s right, and says, “Okay. Tell me what happened.”

Bill does, slowly and steadily. On the one hand, it’s a little anticlimactic. But on the other hand, they had literally no other solutions or weapons or secret rituals at their disposal, so it was either this or death. Bill says the others hadn’t known that Richie and Eddie had survived the stabbing and falling ceiling, and their rage had fueled them. Bev in particular, when pulling out It’s heart, said it was for Richie and Eddie and Stan.

Richie is touched, despite still being alive.

When Bill is done, he’s silent. He’s no longer touching Richie, but he’s making a fist and gripping it tightly, like he wants to smash it right into Its face. They both stare at the floor.

“We should do a movie together,” Richie says.

Bill snorts. “I think I’m b-blacklisted now.”

“No, but I’m serious.”

“I write horror books, Richie.”

“I could do horror. Are you kidding? You think I can’t do horror?”

“I saw you kissing Eddie, Rich.”

The thing about Bill is — speaking fucked him up so long, so he doesn’t have time for lies. It used to take so long for words to make their way out, what was even the _point_ if they weren’t true? Even the stories he tells are a kind of truth, even though they’re fiction, which is probably why they have such shitty endings. Bill always was a source of guidance for them growing up, and even if they hadn’t known why, it was partly for this — he told the truth, while so many adults liked to lie. Even when it was scary, Bill knew it was better to know.

And so he probably sees something on Richie’s face, because he puts his hand on his uninjured shoulder and says, “It’s okay, man.” And the last column propping up Richie’s internalized homophobic hysteria crumbles into dust, just like that. Because Bill says it’s okay, and that must be true.

And then Bill says, “Although, your timing is shit.”

And Richie starts crying again, even as he starts laughing again, because he’s here with Big Bill with his bare thighs sticking to this fucking plastic hospital chair, Bill still covered in sewage and blood, Richie the one of only two people in the fucking world with an alien spider-claw injury — and it’s okay. And just because one form of hysteria is gone, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a whole bunch of others.

“Eddie didn’t seem to mind,” Richie says, still crying, because now he’s got a whole new avenue of comedy to explore, and there’s no time like the present to get started.

“Yeah,” Bill says, looking thoughtful. “I think It did, though. When you guys were, uh, k-kissing, all of a sudden It stopped attacking and looked — surprised? Or upset? It shrunk, for just a second. That’s how I was able to see you two.”

“Huh.” Richie thinks about it. “Maybe we should have just had an orgy to stop It.”

“Ugh,” says Bill. “That’s an even worse idea than the R-Ritual of Chüd.”

They sit on that for a moment, Richie’s shoulder throbbing, the crud on Bill’s skin starting to peel. “I’m sorry,” Bill says suddenly. “I could just — s-see you were going to pretend it never h-happened and. Well, you shouldn’t.”

Was he? Richie hasn’t really had time to unpack the kiss, but he wouldn’t be very surprised if he did decide to ignore it. Outwardly, anyway. Internally, he’d probably spend the rest of his miserable life thinking about it.

“It was the best kiss I’ve ever had,” Richie realizes. “Well, up to the impaling.”

Bill snorts and opens his mouth. Richie says, “No, you don’t get to make that joke until I do.”

Bill smiles. He says, “Sit up, man, that can’t be good for your shoulder.”

They sit back in the chairs, watching Mike speak animatedly on the phone at the nurses station.

“You think it’s going to be a problem?” Bill asks.

“I don’t know. For a kind, inexplicably handsome small town librarian, he can be pretty fucking convincing. You should go get cleaned up, man. I’ll call you if I’m arrested for murder.”

Bill nods, but doesn’t move. He looks too drained to move. Richie knows the feeling. Exhaustion is cascading through him like a waterfall.

“Mr. Tozier?” A short, gray-haired doctor approaches them, squinting hard at Bill and his filthy, filthy self. Then she shifts to Richie. “Son, are you wearing pants under that gown?”

“That’s kind of a personal question,” he says. His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth, but he manages to say, “Eddie?”

The doctor’s evil eye is on both of them now. “Your friend is gonna be fine. Broken collarbone and a lot of blood loss, but the arm stays on, for now anyway.” Probably at the way Richie sags in relief so hard he groans in pain, the doctor stops looking so severe. “He’s a tough guy. I’ve never seen anyone regain consciousness from that much blood loss just to give me a full medical history.”

“Oh my god,” says Richie, covering his mouth. “I like him so much.”

Bill pats his shoulder in sympathy.

The doctor tells them he’s still sedated, but they can see him once he wakes up. Before she leaves, she says, “Let me know when you get up so we can sterilize the chair.”

Mike wanders up. “I have to go meet the Sheriff at the library.” He looks down at himself sadly. “I hope I have a change of clothes in my car.”

“What’d you tell him?” Richie asks lowly, edging forward. “What story are we going with?”

Mike looks confused. “The truth? Just minus the clown, of course.”

“Oh, of _course._ Of _course_ , the truth. Why didn’t I think of that? How do you just _minus_ the fucking clown?” Richie is no longer speaking lowly.

“The same way you all did for twenty-seven years.” Mike rolls his eyes. “It’s a nice change for me for once. I’ll be back quick as I can. Here’s the number for the library if you need to reach me.” He hands Bill a slip of paper, as he’s the only one with pockets. “Richie, the Sheriff wants your statement too, so I’ll probably be back with him.” He claps Bill hard on shoulder, lingering with a smile, before heading out.

“Wait!” Richie calls to him fruitlessly. “What statement? What’s the story? How do I _minus the fucking clown!”_

He gets nothing but a joint shush from a team of nurses near the exit.

Then they have nothing to do but sit. Bev comes back, still streaked with grime but eyes bright, and she brings good news of Ben’s inevitable recovery. Eventually, she and Bill also leave, to get cleaned up and grab the rest of their luggage. It’s Derry, and everything is a twenty minute drive. Richie stays put while he waits for his clothes, a little afraid if he stands up, the chair will come with him.

It’s hours before Mike comes back with the Sheriff, at the same time the doctor comes back saying they could go see Eddie. Ignoring Bill’s look, he desperately agrees to speak to the Sheriff.

Turns out, _minusing the clown_ is pretty easy. Henry Bowers, sad, unstable, completely deranged racist Henry Bowers, had a lifelong grudge against the Hanlon family. True. For twenty-seven years, he remained close to Derry, and could have easily discovered Mike still worked in town. True, feasible. Bowers broke out of Juniper Hill a few days ago, killing a handful of people, apparently fucking true even though they all just learned about it and it’s horrifying. He went looking for Mike, true. He tried to kill Mike, true. Mike still had bruises around his neck, true. Richie, a childhood friend, was in town with the rest of the losers for a little reunion. True, technically. Richie happened upon Bowers trying to kill Mike, true. Richie struck Bowers with an object from a display case in the library, true. It was an old axe, true. It was a clear crime of passion, true. It was clear self-defense, also true.

Richie shifts awkwardly in his clean sweatpants and shirt as the Sheriff excitedly recites the whole story for him. Apparently, he’s a big fan of Richie’s.

“I love your Comedy Central special, Mr. Tozier,” the Sheriff says after letting Richie off the hook for murder. “It really brought me and my step-son closer together, we both love to recite it.”

“That’s really nice to hear,” Richie says faintly, feeling slightly regretful that, since this is Derry, he’s probably going to ruin their bonding time the moment he publicly steps out of the closet. “Hope his mom isn’t nearby to hear.”

“Nah, she can’t hear too well from the _kitchen,”_ the Sheriff says pointedly, winking like he’s providing Richie some A-plus material.

It’s on the tip of his tongue. Just say it, Tozier. _I like to suck dick, actually._ Who cares if it doesn’t make sense to the natural flow of conversation. It’ll feel so good to say it.

“Anyway, can I get a picture?” the Sheriff asks.

“Oh,” says Richie. “No. No thank you. Um, trying to keep the whole hospital stay on the DL. Maybe an autograph?”

The Sheriff gets a blank prescription pad from a nurse. He just laughs when Richie writes _Stick it to your old man, break the fucking law_ above his name. It’s the least Richie can do.

He doesn’t know where the rest of the Losers are. When he finally gets to Eddie’s room, none of them are there.

Eddie is much more awake than he has any right to be. He’s strapped into some kind of shoulder-arm-torso contraption that someone, somewhere on the internet has probably sexualized. His skin is still pale but his cheeks are flushed, sweat dotting his forehead. He doesn’t look like he can move much, but he is still hanging nearly all the way out of the bed, loudly talking into a phone. His grip on it must be something else, because a young nurse is pulling on the cord with all of her strength, even has one foot propped on the bed, and Eddie still won’t let it go.

“—no, I didn’t _say_ I wanted a _horse,_ Myra, I said _divorce,_ I’m _divorcing you,”_ Eddie says into the receiver, twisting as far from the nurse as he can, who is now climbing up the cord like she’s scaling a rock wall. “No, I don’t — _I don’t_ have a head injury. I’m in the hospital but — _NO_ not every person who goes to a hospital has a head injury! What the — tell her I don’t have a head injury.”

He holds the phone out to the nurse, who pauses in pulling. “No, he doesn’t have a head injury,” she says, but her tone suggests he might get one soon. “Mr. Kaspbrak, please, you need to get off the phone.”

“Yeah, yeah, just a sec,” he says, the years in Long Island coming through. “Myra? Listen, I got hurt but I’m not divorcing you _because_ I got hurt, alright? Will you listen to me?” Suddenly he looks up and sees Richie standing in the doorway. His face twitches. He doesn’t look happy or sad or surprised to see him, too focused on the phone, but he jerks his chin to urge Richie inside. “No, _no,_ I got injured, and then, separately, I want a divorce, what’s so hard about that to understand? I—“ He stops talking. The nurse has pulled the phone out of the wall.

“You’re not a nice man, Mr. Kaspbrak,” the nurse says, frowning at him. She’s young, but she’s well on her way to becoming a hard-ass.

“He really isn’t,” Richie agrees fondly, starting to smile. He freezes. Does that mean Eddie is the _Han Solo_ here? Is Richie the _Princess Leia?_

No, Eddie is definitely Leia. Short and bitchy and just so goddamn cute it makes Richie want to do something stupid, like fight an evil clown or rebel against a totalitarian government.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Eddie asks when they’re alone. He can’t cross his arms, but he’s clearly sulking. His cheeks are still flushed.

“You look like Princess Leia in your hospital gown,” Richie says, and then, for some reason, he blurts out, “You’re not getting divorced become of _me,_ are you?”

“Jesus Christ, _no._ ” Eddie slinks down in his bed as much as he can. “I’m getting a divorce because of me. Will you sit down?”

Richie sits. There’s no sound of a clock ticking, but the silence feels like there should be. Eddie stares at the ceiling. Richie wonders what about Eddie is making him want a divorce. Richie wonders if he’s in any pain. He wonders if he’s allowed to hold his hand. He wonders where the other Losers are.

“I can’t go home,” Eddie sighs to the ceiling. “Not like this. If I go home, she’ll never fucking let me out again.”

Fuck. Eddie never went into detail about his wife, but Richie can get a picture as clear as day.

“I don’t want to go home either,” Richie says, instead of grabbing a new phone so he can watch Eddie yell at his wife some more.

Eddie turns his face to Richie without lifting off the pillow. He’s probably on a lot of pain medication. That’s why he looks so softly at Richie. That’s why he blinks at him slowly, his focus entirely on him, both liquid and solid.

Richie’s meds wore off a while ago. That’s probably why he’s feeling everything right now.

“You don’t like LA?” Eddie asks, not smiling, but not frowning either.

“Fuck no,” says Richie. “The traffic is the worst, and at this point it’s too late for me to ask someone what an oat milk latte is without looking stupid, and _I’m thinking about starting a podcast._ LA fucking sucks.”

Then Eddie does smile. It’s crooked, because of the fresh bandage on his cheek, but it makes his eyes go from sad to sweet like a fresh coat of paint. “I bet you’d have the worst fucking podcast in the world, man.”

“Oh, absolutely. It’s going to be me rating _Street Fighter_ characters, and each episode will be over an hour long.”

“That’s the dumbest fucking idea for a podcast I’ve ever heard, Rich.”

The thing about Eddie is — he makes Richie want to do every dumb idea he’s ever had. Like now. Richie realizes he’d had every intention of pretending nothing happened beneath Neibolt except a near death experience, buffered by the presence of all their shell-shocked and injured friends to easily ignoring the kiss. But now Richie has another dumb idea, here, in this hospital room in shitty fucking Derry.

The idea is this: _figure out how you can kiss him again._

“How you feeling?” Richie asks, feeling like a pervert for scooting his chair closer to the bed.

“Impaled,” Eddie says, but with a wince of pain and Richie can’t bring himself to make the joke. “I don’t really remember what happened. You got hurt the same way, right?”

The bottom of Richie’s stomach falls out. It’s like being stabbed again, except ten times more painful. “Oh,” he says, swallowing around his dry tongue. “You — you don’t remember? Anything?”

Eddie shakes his head. “Just — bits and pieces. Just of It, of fucking course. Doctor said it’s from the trauma, but it might not come back to me at all. I guess that’s probably a good thing, right?”

“Yeah,” Richie says. He takes off his glasses again. They’re cracked and dirty and that’s why he’s having trouble seeing anything at all. He struggles to clean them on the bottom of his shirt with only one good hand. “Yeah, that’s—”

“Oh my _god, dude._ ” Eddie — is laughing.

Eddie has great comedic timing, apparently. Who the fuck knew.

“Oh,” says Richie stupidly. “Oh. Oh, you _asshole.”_

Eddie cackles. “You fucking fell for it! Oh my _god._ ”

“Very funny, very fucking funny. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You _just_ heard me say I didn’t get a head injury, dumbass!”

“I don’t know how brains work! Fuck you!”

Eddie keeps laughing, and Richie decides Eddie laughing at him might be best case scenario with all this, even while he’s trying to pick his heart back up where it fell two feet below his feet.

“Is this usually how you talk about your feelings?” Richie asks. “I can’t imagine what your fucking wedding vows sounded like.”

“I don’t remember,” Eddie says, grinning, face all red. He’s definitely still on pain medicine.

“You’re so high right now,” Richie accuses. “I can’t talk to you about anything serious right now, you’d never forgive me.”

“I’m not high!” But he sinks further into his pillow when he says it, looking fucking ridiculously comfortable and also high. “Anyway, what the fuck is so serious to talk about? I thought everything was a joke for you.”

“No,” says Richie. “Not everything.” He wants to touch Eddie’s hand. His aim is off, since he has to use his left, and it lands on Eddie’s wrist instead. He can feel Eddie’s pulse kick up under his hand. Maybe that’s Richie’s own heartbeat, throbbing all the way down to his fingertips.

Eddie doesn’t look surprised or scared or panicked or uncomfortable or angry. He just watches Richie, his gaze heavy and warm like a familiar blanket from childhood. Richie lets out a breath he doesn’t realize he’d been holding.

“You kissed me,” Eddie says.

“I— yes,” Richie says.

Eddie seems to think about it. “Weird fucking time to do that, dude.”

“I _know._ ”

“We were in a sewer, man.”

“ _I know._ Also the whole clown thing.”

Eddie sighs. He’s about to fall asleep again. Divorcing Myra seemed to take it out of him. Fondness wrapped itself dangerously tight around Richie’s heart like a group of friends killing fear Itself. He remembers, suddenly, the first time seeing Eddie and thinking _cute_. He’d called him that a thousand times out loud just to fuck with him, but the first time thinking it privately, secretly, a _cute_ filled with dread — he’d been turning in his seat in homeroom one morning to say something stupid, and there Eddie had been, sleeping on his folded arms on his desk. It had been a Tuesday, Richie remembers. He’d given Eddie every single Spiderman comic he owned to read since his mom wouldn’t let him read them, afraid of spiders or afraid of Eddie trying to crawl up the walls or some shit. He’d meant for Eddie to peruse them at his leisure, but apparently Eddie had been up all night reading.

Richie had taken in his sleeping face, the little drool coming out of his mouth, onto the freckles on his arms, the dark shadows under his eyes, his shirt collar flipped inward, the messy, unbrushed hair, unlike his usual combed look, and with dismay, Richie had let the word _cute_ wander through his brain. Then he’d spent the rest of the day avoiding him.

Eddie’s in a hospital gown now. His shoulder and torso are strapped together by gauze and velcro, his cheek still bandaged. But Richie can see the freckles still on his other bare arm. His hair is a fucking mess again. The shadows under his eyes are more permanent and lined. _Cute_ , Richie thinks. _Good fucking god, he’s cute._

He’s not asleep yet, though. His eyes are closed, but he still mumbles, almost sighs, “Never been kissed like that before.”

The hands around Richie’s heart squeeze until it bursts. “Yeah, buddy,” he says, for some reason about to cry again. “Me neither.”

Richie watches Eddie sleep for a little while longer. Then he goes outside to make a phone call. Eddie can’t go home again. Richie doesn’t want to go home. So he finds them somewhere else for them to go.

* * *

Richie’s feeling really manly when he climbs out of the rented pick-up truck. Mountain dust kicks up around his feet. His lungs expand with the scent of earth and evergreen, a clean, summery smell clinging to the afternoon air. His shoulder aches from the drive, and the doctor in Derry said it might bother him every so often for the rest of his life, but even that feels manly to Richie. He knows a lot of dudes who’ll be like, “Oh yeah, my elbow’s always fucked now when it rains because of a high school football injury” or “I got a bum knee from taking a bad fall during a 5k marathon for puppy cancer” or whatever. Well fuck you, he got stabbed by a clown while kissing a cute boy in a literal river of shit. It doesn’t get much manlier than that.

The town nearest the cabin is called Nederland. Richie can’t say it without putting on a Dutch accent. It’s small but not isolated, near enough to Rocky Mountain National Park if he decides to fuck around one day and go look for a moose or something. He actually has no idea what to do with himself in this environment. He’d bought a flannel jacket in the Denver Airport, even though it’s like 80 degrees still and technically, being in the mountains means they’re closer to the sun, right?

Still, Richie feels fine. He feels manly. He does not feel out of his element, even though feeling fine and feeling manly have never, ever been part of his general element. He’s surrounded by pine trees. He wants to find his inner Brawny Man.

And he could be doing a lot worse.

“Aw, shit, dude,” says Eddie, falling out of the truck. “Are those bear tracks? I think those might be bear tracks. I’m not fucking staying here if there’s a bear nearby, no, _fuck_ _you_!” He yells this last part, presumably to any bears that might be in the area. “What the fuck, I thought you said it was a cabin?”

“It’s a cabin.”

“It’s a fucking mansion, dick! Just because it’s in the woods doesn’t make it a _cabin_.”

“I— it doesn’t? I think it’s, like, made of wood still.”

Eddie stares at him incredulously over the bed of the truck. It’s been a few weeks since the sewers of Derry, and his face is no longer bandaged. There’s a healing cut on his cheek, his arm held up now by a regular, black sling. All the clean shirts he had left had been button-downs, which are a bitch with one hand, so he’s wearing a plain white Hanes undershirt and jeans, looking like a model in a Pepsi commercial Richie wished he’d had growing up. He’s holding a gallon of water in his hand, half empty from the ride up. He’d spent the whole time from the airport worrying about getting elevation sickness. Apparently hydration was key to avoiding it.

“Whose fucking _mansion_ is this? Please tell me it’s not yours.”

“ _No._ ” Richie had wanted to find someplace Eddie could heal. Someplace he could heal too. That certainly wouldn’t be fucking happening in LA. “It belongs to a friend of a friend of an A-list drug addict who uses it as their dry-out spot. Very hush-hush. Or I think it is. It might be his sex addition dry-out spot.”

“What’s the difference?”

“One of them still has the sex dungeon. C’mon.”

When Richie had called his agent Steve asking for the connection, he’d discovered that most of the comedy community was convinced he’d had a mental breakdown on stage due to stress, drugs, and just generally being a fraud. It’s not too far off the mark, so Richie had just leaned into it for use of the _cabin_ for a month. It’s designed for fuck ups to find clarity. Richie had nodded his way through the phone call, declined to mention the murder he’d committed in his absence, and gave the address of the Derry B&B for the keys.

It’s — a very _large_ cabin, but mansion is pushing it a little. Two-storied, modern, and sprawling, it sits at the end of a narrow, bumpy driveway off a very narrow, winding road in the Rockies. The closest house is about a mile in each direction. Richie might have miscalculated a destination intended to get Eddie to fucking relax. Eddie nearly had a mental break just getting up here, analyzing the risks of every absent guardrail and hairpin turn.

Inside is all sleek wood and black appliances. There’s a conversation pit, but even that looks modern. The ceilings are high and vaulted, with large windows making it feel like the outside is still with them, the heavy green leaves of the trees flush against the glass. He’d been told a cleaning crew had come in and straightened up and stocked the pantries with food, but they’re responsible from here on out.

“It’s — nice,” says Eddie begrudgingly. He flicks the cap of his jug of water and takes a long drink. His forearm flexes as he does so, and Richie turns away. He goes into the kitchen, except it’s a fucking open concept and there’s no escape there. He suddenly feels lightheaded.

“Whoa, are you okay?” Eddie is, of course, right behind him. “You look pale. Is it the altitude? Here, drink.” He forces his water jug up to Richie’s mouth and Richie has no choice but the accept, the lip still wet from Eddie’s mouth.

This had all seemed like an excellent fucking idea at the time. The time being five fucking minutes ago, even. But now that he has Eddie here, it’s like he’s _trapped_ Eddie. His arm is still fucked up. He had nowhere else to go, and now he’s _trapped_ here with Richie. He’d just wanted to make sure Eddie was okay, that he was taken care off because of his fucking injuries, and now he’s imprisoned him in some fucking mansion in the woods like a goddamn Victorian villain. Or worse. Like his goddamn ex-wife. Like his goddamn _mother,_ always doing what she thought was best for Eddie.

“Yeah,” Richie gasps, taking the jug out of Eddie’s grip. “Yeah, the — the altitude. Fuck.” He takes another drink, too much, and starts coughing. Eddie pounds hard on his back until he stops.

“Go…. sit in that hole,” Eddie says, pointing to the cushioned conversation pit. “I have some Advil in my bag, hold on.” He heads to the door.

“Hey, wait.” Richie grips the counter tightly. “This is — fine, right? You’re okay here? I can drive you back to the airport if you want. Whenever you want. We can go now, if _you_ _want_. Wherever is — it’s fucking fine, right?”

Eddie stops dead. He does a complicated move with his eyebrows before settling on concerned. He looks so fucking light in that white t-shirt.

“Yeah, Rich,” he says. “This is fine. It’s perfect. I never…” He doesn’t finish.

But Richie can fill in the blanks. He never got to go to a place like this before. Suburbs or city, that was it for him. Out here, there were wild animals. Poison ivy. _Allergens._ Forgetting about that summer in Derry made him forget reading his mom for shit, and he never had a chance to crawl back out from that hole until now.

“Good,” says Richie, except Eddie has already gone outside to get his Advil. He looks out the window, at the trees as wild and lush as the Barrens, and at the mountain range beyond, still and dark as a calm sea. “Good.”

__

Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be a sex dungeon.

Not that they’d ever use it. Richie just wants to see one.

They’d spent the whole first night getting drunk in the conversation pit, talking shit about what they remember and eating popcorn and Oreos for dinner, because they don’t get delivery up here and neither of them feels like cooking. One of them will have to feel like it eventually, or they’ll starve.

They’d been in the Derry Hospital for almost three weeks before getting released. Well, Richie got released way before that, but Eddie had taken longer, what with the two holes. Mike and Bill had already moved on, both of them heading to England. Mike for the vacation, Bill to hopefully repair his marriage. They text, though, and Mike and Audra apparently get on like a house on fire.

Ben isn’t being released for another week, and Richie had offered the cabin for both him and Bev to use as well, for Ben’s recovery. But the physical therapist at the hospital hadn’t thought a mountain range would be very manageable with Ben still in a cast, so they’d declined. Which is fine, because as soon as Richie mentioned it, it suddenly felt like a _couples retreat_. He’s pretty sure they had both read the panic in Richie’s face and just made up the thing about the physical therapist.

They hadn’t talked about the kiss again. They hadn’t talked about Richie holding Eddie’s wrist. Eddie had to get a minor surgery to repair some fucking muscle or something in his shoulder, and spend most of the time sleeping or complaining about the food or arguing with lawyers on the phone. As far as Richie could tell, he hasn’t spoken to Myra since that first day. He’d once seen Bev talking to Eddie from his hospital bed, Eddie white as the sheets, Bev smiling but very, very serious. She’d refused to tell Richie what they’d been talking about, and he’d never asked Eddie.

And now they’re still not talking about the kiss, and exploring a strange house. Richie had fallen asleep in the conversation pit last night. He doesn’t know where Eddie slept, but he woke this morning to Eddie kicking his ankle to get him up. Outside, the trees are seem to shake with sunlight, way into the morning.

Bleary-eyed, he stumbles after Eddie, who doesn’t let him grab a beer on his way out the pit. The upstairs is mostly bedrooms of varying sizes, and even bigger bathrooms. Eddie keeps trying to guess which celebrity it belongs to. Nothing about the decor gives it away; it’s like a hotel near the beach that only has desert art. He’s having a tough time believing Richie knows any A-lister, and so he keeps aiming too low.

“Ryan Seacrest?”

“What? No.”

“Mario Lopez?”

“No. Why do you think I only know TV hosts from the E Network?”

“Dude, you’re totally gonna end up hosting a shitty TV show on there someday. Carson Daly?”

“Is he still even alive?”

In the basement, they find more interesting things. No sex dungeon, but a sauna, a fucking movie theater, an underground zen garden, the kind of smoky den you’d find gangsters secretly playing poker inside of in a noir film, a large and dusty gym, a mini-arcade that makes Richie break out in hives, an uncomfortable looking set for _some_ kind of photo shoots, a second kitchen, and a —

“What the fuck is _this_ for?” Eddie asks, indignant.

“Podcasting, duh.” Richie circles the table, which is set up with two mics. The walls are covered in bumpy foam for better sound. The whole system is idiot proof, a flip of the switch near the back wall turns on everything, bright red recording dots lighting up across the room like Christmas. A beat-up old Mac turns on, already open to some kind of recording software.

“Who the fuck comes here as rehab and decides to start podcasting?”

“It’s cheaper than therapy,” Richie says, sitting down in front of one of the mics. “Excuse me, I mean it’s easier to monetize your therapy.”

Eddie doesn’t sit down. He looks like the mics might strike out like a cobra. “You were shitting me about started a podcast, right?”

“Jesus, yes.” But he leans into the microphone anyway, doing his best Edward R. Murrow. “ _Good evening, ladies and gentleman, it is just past 11 AM in the year of our lord 2019. This is Richard Tozier, reporting from the middle of fucking nowhere, and I believe I am about to get the Hungover Shits. Stay tuned.”_

“God.” Eddie does sit down at that. Directly into the microphone, and way louder than necessary, he says, “You’re disgusting.”

“Don’t worry. There doesn’t seem to be a bathroom in this basement, but there’s always the zen garden.”

The face Eddie makes is directly out of 1989. “Is this shit actually recording?”

“I have no idea,” says Richie, because he genuinely doesn’t. Red light usually means _go_ in this industry, and there are a lot of them, but there’s no where for any of it to actually _go_. “I’ll fuck around with the computer later. Worse comes to worst, we can just drop it off a cliff if we say anything incriminating.”

Eddie snorts, shifting the sling strap around his neck into a more comfortable position.

“We should start a podcast,” Richie decides.

“What the fuck would we do a podcast about?” Eddie says. “Dumb and outdated _your mom_ jokes you can share with your friends?”

“Fuck you, my mom’s dead.”

“So’s mine! You called her Jabba the Hutt like a month ago!”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” Richie lies. “I was probably drunk. Anyway, we could start a podcast. We could call it _Two Forty-Year Old Newly Gay Men Recover From What Was Technically A Hate Crime That Left Them Hospitalized And Discuss Their Horrifying And Repressed Childhood Traumas, Their Weird Unrequited Adolescent Crushes They Haven’t Gotten Over Yet, And All The Pop Culture References They Can Now Make But Don’t Understand But Don’t Want To Admit It, And That’s The Tea._ I think it’ll be a hit.”

There’s a lot there that could be making Eddie’s eyes widen, that could be making him swallow nervously and glance at the dusty computer in the corner. Richie’s sure the pounding of his heart is captured in the audio.

But all Eddie says is, “So you’re going to publicly come out? Won’t that fuck with your career?”

It’s probably the last thing he’d thought Eddie would latch onto. “Um. Yeah, I guess? I mean, my career is kind of a joke anyway, and not in, like, the _good_ way. And I’m just. I don’t know. It’s been a dumb secret for so long and like, I don’t even know _why._ I mean, I know why, but it just seems stupid now. Nearly dying throws every stupid thing I’ve ever done in sharp fucking relief, and most of the stupid shit is specifically things I _haven’t_ done. I’m just fucking tired, man. Y’know?”

And Eddie says, “Yeah. I know.” He rubs his eyes with one hand, a frustrated gesture but not one directed at Richie. Then he cracks a smile and says, “But think of all your hot fangirls who’ll be so disappointed at losing their shot.”

“Fuck you,” Richie says, because everyone knows his fanbase is middle schoolers and frat boys. He’s never had a panty tossed at him in his life. “Anyway I’m going to reinvent myself. I’m going to start wearing turtlenecks, get a Twitter, come out as a flaming homosexual, start a podcast, and then write a memoir about that time I killed my childhood bully.”

“ _Allegedly_.” Eddie reaches over and tries to grab Richie’s mic. “Jesus fucking _Christ_ , Richie.”

“Jesus, Eds, it’s not like I’m Ted fucking Kennedy. It was self-defense, I was cleared of everything, and you hissing _allegedly_ is way more suspicious than me just saying it.”

“ _Still_ ,” Eddie pouts. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

“You’re asking a lot, Spagheds.”

Eddie frowns. “ _Was_ it technically a hate crime? Just because we got hurt while…. Being gay?”

“I think that’s how it works. Hate was definitely involved.” _Just say it. Idiot. Idiot, just say it._ “I mean, we were kissing at the time.”

The look on Eddie’s face shifts, from annoyed to serious, like a curtain closing. They’ve just been stupidly talking around it, casually calling themselves _gay_ like it doesn’t mean anything, and not talking about the big fucking thing that gave them both away from the start. “Yeah,” Eddie says. “We were.” He smiles, the cut on his cheek deepening the dimple. “We were in danger before that, though.”

“I’m always in danger around you.” Richie means it as a joke, but it doesn’t end that way. His voice cracks around _danger_ , and the _you_ falls deep into the fissure it makes.

Eddie’s still smiling, but it’s gone from small and shy to secret and daring without moving a single muscle. It’s all in his eyes. “Nah,” he says. “You’re not. And neither am I. That’s the whole thing.”

Richie has _no idea what that means_. It takes him a long moment before he says, “See what I mean about monetizing therapy? It’s a lot easier to say stuff in front of a microphone.”

“Well, you’d know.” Eddie looks down, looks directly at the mic and not at Richie at all, and says, really fast, “Do you think making out will help or hinder our recovery?”

This little fucking _tart_. No, it’s cool, it’s fine, Richie isn’t using any of his internal organs anyway. They can be liquified, it’s no problem. In all his internal focus on trying to find a way again to kiss Eddie, it’s never occurred to him that Eddie might be trying to find a way to kiss Richie first. It’s dumb, because it’s the complete antithesis to everything Richie knows about Eddie. He’s not passive, he’s not afraid, he’s not soft. He’s stupid, and stubborn, and weird, and he’s also a thousand times too good for Richie. He’d only been thinking about getting one more kiss out of him, and not really thinking of anything beyond that. One good kiss out in the sunshine, maybe, on something soft, in dry clothes that didn’t smell like shit. One good kiss to replace the one that tasted of bitter adrenaline, that was punctuated by blinding fear and blinding pain. Just one good kiss, that’s all. He hadn’t expected anything more than that.

“Um,” says Richie clearing his throat. He retreats into himself, a little bit. “Let’s get a professional opinion. Dr. Phil, what do you say? ... _Hwhy, I do think it’d do you both a lot of good to get that boy horizontal, and fast_ , _y’hear? But maybe take yourself a shower first, you stink like a dang pig bathed in a tub of Jack._ ”

“Ugh,” says Eddie, rolling his eyes. “Nevermind. The mood’s gone.”

“No, wait! I think I’ve got a Dr. Ruth, that’d be more appropriate. Just give me a fucking second to get it.”

“Okay, you do that.” Eddie gets up. “I’ll find some other fucking way to keep myself busy.”

“Eddie!” Richie calls after him, but he’s already left the room. “How— wait, fuck, how the fuck do I turn this shit off. Eduardo!”

* * *

Richie does take a shower. Try as he might, he just can’t scrub off the surrealness that’s coating him like mountain dirt. His insides still feel like jelly from hearing Eddie say _making out_ and from the liquor he had last night. He’s too old to drink that much. He never did it consistently enough to be a full-on alcoholic. Just the occasional black-out bender throughout the years he could never get really accustomed to and just made him feel like shit — before, during, and after.

He hasn’t felt human in awhile. It’s a hard feeling to shake, after being trapped in an alien’s evil throat lights and then having a piece of said alien directly in your body. It’s like his blood has been replaced with oil. His skin doesn’t feel aligned to the rest of his skeleton, like it’s all slipping to one side.

The shower helps somewhat. When he gets out, he realizes all his shit is still in the backseat of the rental truck. Digging through the closets of the bedroom he’d chosen, he finds a fluffy white robe that barely hits his knees and puts it on. Since he already feels like the world’s biggest tool, he puts on the matching slippers, too.

He finds Eddie on the veranda out back. He’s got his sling off, and he’s put on some workout clothes, and he’s doing, uhh, possibly yoga. Possibly tai-chi. Something very still and slow and probably good for stretching. Behind him is a sweeping view, the land dropping down and covered in trees, the mountains rolling and dark purple in the distance. Eddie doesn’t look nervous about bears now. His face is turned, even as his body faces the land, and his eyes are closed. Apparently the thin wooden railing around the elevated patio is enough to curb his bear worries.

Richie has to bite down hard on his tongue, hard enough to draw blood, and only part of it is because of the way he can see Eddie’s thighs moving in his workout pants or his shoulders in his muscle tee. The sling is cast aside on the back of a lawn chair, and Richie’s heart races like he’s caught in another death match with a monster. In the span of two seconds he thinks, _Jesus Christ Eddie put that thing back on you’re going to hurt yourself even more are you crazy don’t hurt yourself again_ and then _Jesus Christ Richie he’s a grown man and he’s not yours to control or yours to decide what’s best for him he can make his own decision don’t be like fucking THEM_

Except it’s different this time, isn’t it? Eddie is actually hurt this time. Richie had tasted Eddie’s blood in his mouth, had gotten his blood in Richie’s own wound. He’d carried him out of the sewer by himself, even though he’d also been injured, and he did it because he cares about Eddie more than anything. Surely that allows him some say in how Eddie takes care of himself?

Except the answer is, of course it doesn’t. Richie isn’t allowed anything of Eddie that Eddie doesn’t want to give him.

And Richie has no idea what Eddie wants to give him.

The thing about Richie is — he talks a lot, but he’s also always been ready and willing to listen. It’s just so few people ever actually want to talk to him.

Maybe he has to invite it for Eddie to talk to him. Maybe he has to ask.

Maybe he can go fuck himself.

“You look like Hugh Hefner,” Eddie says. He’s stopped whatever exercise he’s doing to stare at Richie. He’s holding his left arm differently — not painfully, just like it’s not right. He’s purposely looking Richie in the eye, the bridge on his nose a little red. “And I mean that in the creepiest way possible.”

RIchie is suddenly, painfully, clearly, extremely, unbearably aware that he’s completely fucking naked. His glasses are streaked from the fog of being in the bathroom with him during his shower. His hair is wet and pushed back in a way that makes him horribly aware of his receding hairline. He can feel water still dripping down the hair on his legs. Somehow, this is so much worse than his bare ass sticking out of a hospital gown.

“Um,” says Richie. “How you doing? Is this still okay here?” Then he curses himself. He should have made a joke about the robe and now Eddie is looking at him funny.

“Yeah,” says Eddie slowly, waiting for the burn. “It’s great here.”

“....Great.”

“Great.”

 _You said you wanted to make out_ , Richie doesn’t say. _You implied you wanted to make out with ME._

“It reminds me of the Barrens,” Richie says instead, like a fucking idiot. He joins Eddie by the patio railing. “Without all the trash and shit.”

“And dead bodies.”

“Well, we haven’t explored it yet. Give it a chance.”

There _is_ an air of the Barrens here, and not just because there are a shitload of trees. Growing up, the Barrens had been secrecy, safety from the harsh world around them. But it had also been a place of exploration, of discovery. A place where they could be themselves and thus, open to such discovery. So few true places like that exist for children, and even less for adults.

“So listen,” Eddie says suddenly. They’re both gazing out at the landscape, and not at each other. “I want to. I want to figure out what this is and what. What is happening. Here. I just. Don’t want to fuck it up. I know you’ll tell me if. If i do. Just, try not to be such a bitch about it, okay?”

Richie has _no idea what he’s talking about._ But he says, “Okay. I’ll try.” Because it’s what Eddie is asking him to do. At Eddie’s look of disbelief, Richie says, “Sorry, my forty year old shitty defense mechanism hasn’t caught up with the fact that I’m no longer lying to myself. The system is still rebooting, I’ll think of something stupid to say soon.”

Eddie snorts. “I don’t fucking doubt it. Listen. We were friends when we were kids, and then we fought an evil fucking clown together, and then friends a little while after that. Now we’re grown up, and all we’ve done is fought that dumb fucking clown together. Maybe we should figure out if we are still. Y’know. Friends. See if you still even ...”

 _Like me_ is how that sentence ends. And Eddie doesn’t just mean physically. Richie knows he’s not the only person on this earth to hate himself, his narcissism isn’t that huge. But it shakes him, makes him want to _shake Eddie,_ to think that there’s something about Eddie that Eddie doesn’t like. He doesn’t know much about this new adult version of Eddie, but the one he’d grown up with had often been equally down on himself and it used to make Richie sick. Eddie is _great_. Unless Eddie has completely become a different person, and joined, like, his local chapter of the KKK, he’s pretty sure he’ll still like him.

“Have you joined your local chapter of the KKK?” he asks.

“What? No!”

“Okay. Then I think we’ll probably be fine. But yeah, let’s just. Figure it out.” Because there’s definitely the chance Eddie won’t like Richie. He isn’t even a hundred percent sure Eddie always liked him back then.

“Okay.” Eddie still looks suspicious. “Okay. Well, you’re going to make us dinner, because I can’t with one arm, and I’m going to find something for us to watch on TV, and then you’ll see what I like to watch and I’ll see what you’re able to cook and we can… go from there.”

“That’s extremely practical of you, Eds,” says Richie, already panicking because he can only cook eggs, and not well.

“Okay,” Eddie says again, making a face that Richie feels is supposed to be making fun of his own. “I’m going to shower. I’m starving, by the way. If you want to like, make a fucking note of that.”

 _What were you doing on the patio,_ Richie wants to ask. _What was that called how long have you known how to do it is it helping is THIS helping what were you thinking about when you were doing it._

Instead he says, “So does that mean I’m the wife here?” And then he wants to jump over the patio railing and tumble down into the earth _forever_.

But Eddie is just rolling his eyes, shaking his head, walking away. The sling is limp in his good hand, slapping against his knee. “I fucking guess so,” he calls over his shoulder.

So Richie’s the wife.

That’s. Fine. He’s very aware of his dick right now, but that’s fine. Because Eddie’s not thinking about his _actual_ wife. He’s seen the hunted, angry look when Eddie’s thinking about Myra. The panicked, defensive tone. Richie himself has brought it out in him, in pissing matches in Derry that had left them both feeling overexposed.

Eddie isn’t like that now. He seems — relaxed. For him, anyway.

Yoga is supposed to be relaxing. Probably so is tai chi, or whatever the fuck he was doing.

So Richie is helping. He’s the wife, and that’s helpful to Eddie.

So Richie makes dinner.

Actually he makes breakfast. But it’s only two in the afternoon, so really neither apply. They’re all fucked up from the time difference, even though it’s only two hours and Richie has spent his whole adult life on the west coast. But he knows how to make breakfast.

He makes scrambled eggs with cheese, and he finds a box of pancake mix that literally only needs water so there’s no way he can fuck it up, and a package of turkey bacon that offends Richie but he fries up anyway. He has no idea if Eddie is allergic to any of this. He’d kind of thought all that allergy shit was made up anyway.

When he’s done, Eddie has wrestled the TV into submission. The couch is this wide, low thing — the kind every teenager dreams of making out on, and why the fuck did he just _think_ that? Richie brings them plates of food and absolutely nothing to drink, but when he sees what’s on the screen he goes and grabs himself a beer.

“You, uh, you a _Game of Thrones_ fan?” Eddie asks as the theme song plays, his chest puffed a little like he used to do when he was pretending to not be afraid of _Nightmare on Elm Street_. He’s trying to look cool.

“Uh,” says Richie, because now Eddie’s in a plain black t-shirt, and it’s a little too much for him. He’s got the sling back on, sawing at his pancakes with the long side of his fork without a single word about it. Richie wishes he could pretend to be cool, too. He doesn’t have the capacity. “I watched like, the first season. It’s a little…” _Fucking miserable_. “I could never keep anyone’s names straight.”

“Oh,” says Eddie, looking relieved. “Cool, I’ll just change it.”

Richie has been struck completely dumb exactly twice in his life. The first was when _Trashmouth_ tumbled out of his lips on stage and he’d been hit by a barrage of awful fucking memories that blinded him more than the spotlight on him. The second is now, as Edward Kaspbrak puts on _90-Day Fiance_.

“ _What_ ,” Eddie demands, mouth full of egg, after Richie has been staring at him silently for almost five minutes. “It’s _entertaining._ It makes me feel better about my own marriage, alright? Shut the fuck up about it.”

So Richie listens to him. He shuts the fuck about it.

* * *

_“Ugh this is so fucking stupid. How does Richie stand to talk into a microphone all day? I didn’t even want anyone to give a speech at my goddamn wedding._

_This shit better not be recording. I am absolutely going to throw all this equipment into the woods before I leave. This is so fucking stupid._

_…._

_It_ is _fucking stupid. But I used to drive a lot for work, okay? And I guess I used to talk to myself a bunch, like arguing with the radio or yelling at drivers or whatever. I used to practice arguments out loud all the fucking time, and that’s how I_ won _them, and that’s how I got promoted three times in two years! It’s not_ weird.

_I used to think it was so. I don’t know. So I wouldn’t think so much, all that time alone. Like I was afraid to be with my thoughts. But now I think I was trying to fill the silence left by… like even though I didn’t remember he should have been there, talking to me, the silence never felt...right. It never felt right._

_…._

_This is fucking stupid. But I just did something even_ stupider _, and saying this shit out loud into a_ recording device _is a big stupid fucking risk but it’s like one in the morning and I can’t sleep and like. Okay. I’m a risk analyst, which is_ actually _a really_ interesting job _okay. Like my job is to go around to all these fucking car manufacturers and architectural firms and drug companies and tell them, “Hey, here’s the worst-case scenario on how your product can fuck up and kill everyone.” Like, that’s_ badass _, okay? I spent most of my time thinking about the worst fucking shit in the world, and maybe, sometimes, I got people to actually_ listen _to me because I’m fucking_ good _at my job and I’m_ convincing _because I_ practice _and maybe that’s how I’m able to save_ some _lives over the years. There are worse ways to make a fucking living._

_So I know risks. And this is a risk. And what I did was a risk. But I’m doing it, and I did it, and… ugh. Maybe I did get a head injury._

_But earlier. Okay. I just need to say it, because if I don’t I think I dreamed doing it and then I might actually go insane. Earlier we were watching TV, and we’ve just gotten here, basically. It’s only been a day and all we’ve done is hung out and dick around with shit and been in opposite corners of the house and I’m like. Is this how it’s going to be? The whole time? Is that what I want? Is that what he wants? It’s not_ bad _. I like hanging out with him. It’s comfortable. It’s good. But like…_

 _We were watching TV and he passed out on this ugly ass couch at like 8 o’clock. He’d had. I guess a lot to drink. I don’t know. I should probably try and stop him from drinking so much. His injury isn’t as bad as mine, but he’s still on some pain medicine. I don’t think he’s taking it, though. He always looks a little strained, around the mouth…. Yeah. I think I’m going to hide all the alcohol. Enough of_ that _shit. We’re not teenagers anymore._

 _But he’d been asleep, and I went to do the dishes. I had to do the pre-wash before putting them in the dishwasher_ by myself, _and you might not know this, but I’m fucking operating with one hand here. And he still slept. And then I sat down again. And I went like, Richie, Richie, Richie, Richie. In my normal fucking speaking voice, y’know? I wasn’t trying to make sure he was asleep, okay, I really was trying to wake him up. He’s old, he shouldn’t be sleeping on a fucking couch. He’s going to bitch about his neck all day tomorrow. He still had his fucking glasses on. But I guess. I guess I could have been louder right away. But._

_…_

_He looks different when he’s asleep. Softer. Like there’s no more bullshit. But I really was trying to wake him, and he didn’t wake up. He just sort of. Sighed. And I._

_Ugh._

_…._

_This is so fucking stupid. I sound like a fucking pervert. Why am I even doing this._

_Well now I guess it sounds even worse. I didn’t_ molest _him in his sleep, Jesus Christ. I just..._

_Ismelledhim._

_God. Ugh._

_…._

_Listen. When we were kids, Richie smelled fucking awful. Well. I mean. He smelled like a teenage boy, I guess. I guess we all smelled like that. But I was only ever aware of how_ he _smelled. Like old socks and corn chips and sweat-soaked baby powder and his dad’s shitty aftershave he wore to pretend he was already shaving. It wasn’t a good smell. But it got so twisted in my head, it just became_ Richie _and what Richie became, in my head, in my room at night when I was alone, it — ugh. Fuck this. I don’t need to explain myself to you._

_…._

_I’m a risk analyst. I analyze motherfucking risks. I’m_ good _at it. But none of them are sticking in my brain. Not with him. It’s killing me._

_Worst case scenario: he caught me doing it. Actually, no risk, because I don’t have any fucking clue what would happen if he did._

_Worst case scenario: he called me disgusting and kicked me out of this house, and leave me to be eaten by bears. Actually, no risk. Richie would never do that._

_Worst case scenario: he laughed in my face and made fun of me for it. Actually, no risk. Richie wouldn’t do that to me either. Not if he saw it mattered._

_Worst case scenario: he smiled. He let me. The risk… Fuck._

_The risks just keep slipping out of my grasp. They’re usually so much more solid than that, but I can’t fucking hold on to any of them. Every_ what if _is answered by a certainty that it’ll be fine, because it’s him. Which doesn’t make any fucking sense, because I’m pretty sure he’s able to hurt me the fucking most, more than anyone ever has, more than It. Even though I don’t think he ever would, he could. So easily. None of this makes sense._

_…._

_He smelled really fucking good, too.”_

* * *

Richie wakes up with his neck fucking killing him. He stares at the blurry fog above him, seeing nothing. Then he finds his glasses resting stupidly on his chest, and he put them on. Then stares at the now clearly defined, vaulted wood ceiling of the living room, dusky in a gray, pre-dawn light. It takes him a moment to remember where he is. When it comes to him, his stomach lurches like he’s on a rollercoaster.

Last night. Bad reality TV. Eddie saying, without a hint of irony, “Oh, no, she _didn’t_ ” at whatever was happening in the show. Richie hadn’t absorbed a single moment of it. He’d been struck by the singular, unwavering notion that this is the happiest he’s ever been. He kept drinking, switching from beer to whiskey halfway through the night, to try and shake the feeling. But the drunker he got, the more aware he was of his clothes against his skin, the couch against his body, the lingering smell of burnt bacon in the air, the way the shadows moved through the windows as the sun set outside, and Eddie, Eddie, always Eddie. Every motion, every sound, every glance, it’s like his brain wanted him to remember every detail and so he couldn’t function like a normal person. The alcohol actually made it worse. He just kept slipping on all these details until he finally slipped off to sleep.

He doesn’t know where Eddie is now. Probably sleeping in a normal bed like a normal person. The clock over the oven says it’s not even six. His sleep schedule is so fucked.

He goes upstairs. He uses one of the bathrooms, then takes off his shirt and splashes water on his face and under his arms. He looks like shit. His shoulder aches because he’s a dumbass not sleeping in a bed. Idly, he touches the puckered scar on his shoulder. He hasn’t seen Eddie’s wound yet. Eddie is very serious about keeping it bandaged and uncontaminated. Richie wonders if it looks the same. His scar is like a crater, pink and blistering on the edges. It’s not sexy. It looks violent.

_Today. Today is the day you ask about the kiss. You’re going to ask like a grownup. You’re going to use your tongue and lips and put words to air and make sounds that mean something according to the rules of our society._

Except when he leaves the bathroom to figure out where the fuck he left his suitcase, he hears a sound coming from one of the bedrooms. It stops for a second and then there’s the kind of silence he _hates_ , he hates it like most people hate the sound of nails on a chalkboard. It grates the inside of his skull. It’s the silence of sneaking with Bill inside his own house to get a look at Georgie’s haunted picture. It’s the silence before Paul Bunyon struck. It’s the silence of the person on the other end of the phone before saying _your mother’s dead, your father’s dead, your friends are dead, It’s back Richie you have to come home._

And then the sound again. A whimper, but it echoes in this house without bodies or life. Three doors down.

And Richie is a Loser. And Losers are afraid, constantly, but they look anyway.

And of course, it’s just Eddie.

The soft light is enough to see him, in some oversized, over-soft bed he’s claimed as his own. His forehead is furrowed in sleep, glistening with sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs. His sling is still on, the strap cutting into his neck, turning the pink white with pressure.

He makes another whimper, his breathing hard and ragged in his sleep. Richie can’t even make it sexual, because Eddie looks so clearly freaked out.

Okay, he can make it a little sexual. He’s only human.

He goes to hover over the bed, and then realizes that’s probably a terrifying thing to wake up to. So he sits down, and then that’s just a terrifying thing for Richie to experience. But he can’t do anything about it now, because Eddie is already starting to stir.

“Hey, Eddie, wake up,” he whispers quickly, so it doesn’t look like he’s _watching_ him sleep or some shit. “C’mon, man. You’re having a nightmare.”

“Richie?” It comes out _Rrrch_. He blinks up at Richie, the bruises under his eyes dark and making him look even more like a puppy. He looks exhausted. He’s got _stubble._ None of this feels very fair to Richie.

“You alright, man?” he asks, even though he himself does not sound very right.

Eddie sits up, leaning back on his good arm. It puts him very close to Richie. He’s still clearly half asleep.

Then he lifts his good arm, and Richie has a second to marvel at his core strength to stay upright at this angle, and then Eddie is touching him jaw.

“‘s dreaming,” Eddie murmurs, “about your face…”

Richie swallows heavily. “That does sound very scary.”

Eddie’s fingertips trace up Richie’s cheek, out over the shell of his ear. He bumps the end of Richie’s glasses.

“When It fucking…” Eddie mumbles, touching Richie’s eyebrow now. “And I couldn’t…”

“It’s fine.” Richie’s eyes cross looking at the heel of Eddie’s palm. He’s surprised he hasn’t burned Eddie’s skin off, with how red his face is. “Face still attached. We’re okay.”

Eddie takes that in. He hums, deliberately, blinking sleepily. Then he lays his whole hand on Richie’s face and pushes him back with a funny puff from his mouth. He uses the momentum to lie back down.

 _Oh fuck._ Richie’s back on his elbows, watching Eddie fall back into an easier sleep. _I am so fucked._

Richie goes out for a run.

Okay. So Richie has never run before in his life.

Except _for_ his life. But definitely never for fun.

But the doctor told him to exercise, that it’s good for his injury, and he probably meant like gym shit but he’s discovered over the years that he just cannot put on muscle. So what’s the fucking point then?

He puts on a pair of sweatpants that he definitely bought just to lounge in, and a clean shirt, and he goes out for a run. He desperately needs the fresh air.

Tall, leafy trees loom overhead, peering down at him like mourners as he makes his way down the driveway. It’s cold this early in the morning. He should have grabbed his new flannel shirt.

He knows there are trails, but has no idea where they are. So he takes off down the road, hoping he’s going the right away for any cars not to kill him.

It sucks.

His lungs burn in the first five minutes. His legs shake with the strain. He is _not_ wearing the right shoes for this. He doesn’t know how to pace himself, keeps starting to sprint out of instinct, wearing himself out immediately, slowing to a jog, then taking off again. He’s trying to outrun the feeling of Eddie’s fingers on the curve of his ear, and it isn’t working.

 _You need to talk about the kiss today._ Richie picks up the pace, like someone is behind him, shouting at him and he’s trying not to hear. _He acts like he wants you to do it again. He kissed you back. He touched your ear. It’s fucking go time, what’s the fucking problem?_

The problem is, Richie is running downhill and has to come to a short stop before careening over the side of this mountain where the road turns. He catches himself on a tree, bending over to catch his breath, looking out at the wild woods around him.

Eddie’s right about these roads being fucking dangerous.

And the real problem, obviously, is him.

He doesn’t know if it’s the years of repressing It, the years of shame eroding his self-worth than unfortunately he didn’t forget, or just the plain actual truth — which is, he doesn’t deserve this.

Stan’s dead in a bathtub — and he deserves happiness?

Georgie’s dead in a gutter before leaving kindergarten — and he deserves happiness?

Dozens of dead kids, with bad timing and bad luck and not enough friends the only thing separating Richie from them — and he deserves happiness?

Henry Bowers, driven mad and dead from an axe to his skull that a _fucking fag_ like Richie put there — and Richie deserves _happiness?_

“I’m going to puke,” Richie announces to the Rocky Mountains.

So he does. He’s not always a liar.

It’s only a little, though, off the road and easily buried by dirt. He wipes his chin, trying to breathe. It’s a setting made for screaming at the top of his lungs, but it just sits, trapped in the hollow of his throat, where it’s been for twenty-seven fucking years.

His phone beeps. Richie lets it. He forgot he even had it. He’s still catching his breath. A chipmunk scurries by, stops and stares. Birds sing on the branches overhead. Lower down the mountain, in the distance, he sees a family of deer grazing. He’s a regular fucking Cinderella out here.

His phone beeps again.

It’s Bev in their group chat. He scrolls up and sees everyone’s been chatting in it the last couple days, even Eddie.

_Bev: Good news! Doc says Ben’s good to go home today :)_

_Bev: we’re heading back to his house in Ark, when he’s settled you guys have to visit_

_Mike: That’s great._ (Mike texts like a 70-year old grandma who is texting for the very first time and doesn’t know how to convey real life enthusiasm. It’s actually hilarious.) _I bet it will be good for his physical therapy. Ben told me how wide and flat his land is._

Richie gets sad sometimes he’ll never be as funny as his friends are accidentally. What a fucking librarian.

_Richie: HeyO just like haystack’s ass USED to be! Bev i expect an update on its current status asap_

_Ben: You know I’m in here too, right?_

_Bev: Will report back. How’s Eddie’s?_

_Bev: Eddie*_

“Ohhh, Bev gets off a _good_ one,” Richie mutters, though his face feels on fire. He wonders if Bill or Eddie told the others about the kiss. He certainly didn’t.

The sun is finally up, and there’s no longer a sleepy, purple haze on the horizon. Richie looks out on the expanse of mountain range and evergreen fir trees, cut through by a babbling stream. He understands why people paint this shit over and over. He’s no artist, but the clarity of the air and the simpleness of the lines make him want to _create_ in a way he hasn’t felt since the last time he took mushrooms. God, he should try writing again.

He takes a picture of the scenery instead, and sends it to the group chat.

_Richie: You’ll never find his body._

He puts his phone back in his pocket and leans on a tree. He puts his foot up behind him and feels like he’s in a commercial running for Governor. The idea makes him laugh, and then he wonders when was the last time that actually happened.

Arkansas. They only have use of this house in Colorado for a few weeks. They haven’t discussed what comes next. Richie doesn’t even know if Eddie will even last the whole time stuck here with him. He’s surprised Eddie’s lasted this long already. There’s a divorce to worry about. They both have jobs, technically. Richie has an apartment he hates that is gathering dust. Something has to happen in a few weeks, and he has no idea what.

But, Arkansas might be nice. Richie’s been there once, on tour, over a decade ago. He remembers a shitty comedy club in Little Rock, meeting a blues band that played next door, getting high with them in his Holiday Inn suite, jerking off the bass player in the closed hotel hot tub, and then leaving before the rest of the tour company, and the band, even woke up.

Richie wouldn’t mind going back to Arkansas. See Bev and Ben in well-deserved, heterosexual bliss.

He just hopes he’s not going alone.

He heads back up to the house. He walks this time. Richie is not a runner. But he thinks maybe — just maybe — he might be a walker. The kind of guy who takes long walks. For _fun_. The kind of guy who puts his hands into his pockets as the autumn leaves gently fall and his chocolate lab runs up ahead to the farm, and tells you direct that he’s not like that _other_ guy running for office who’s not gonna lower your taxes or keep your streets safe. But that guy _definitely_ will break into your house in the middle of the night, steal your television, eat your cat, distribute white supremicist literature around the place, and frame you for murder.

Richie walks back to the house slowly. It takes him a while to get there, but he’s too busy thinking to care. And when he gets back home, after making a couple wrong turns, he grabs a pen and a pad of paper from the kitchen drawer, sits down on the patio, and starts to write.

* * *

“Shut the fuck up!” Richie yells, hours later, over a microphone. “It’s not weird! I don’t like shoes! I don’t like wearing them! It’s not fucking weird!”

“What the _fuck_ does that even mean? How can you _not_ like shoes. They’re _shoes_. You just _wear them._ ”

“My feet like to breathe, okay, they need _room._ ”

“Ugh. No wonder I can’t _breathe_ in this fucking _room_ , it stinks from your _run_ earlier.”

Eddie had a lot of fun with Richie’s run earlier. He’d woken up a couple hours after Richie got back, so Richie’d had a lot of fun with Eddie sleeping until almost noon like a fucking teenager. Well, some fun. Eddie had looked bashful, said he hadn’t slept well, and Richie shut the fuck up about it. Neither mentioned Eddie waking up and touching Richie’s ear, and that’s something Eddie might not actually fucking remember this time. But he’s not about to set himself up for _that_ joke again, because he _will_ fall for it.

It’s now late afternoon, after Richie finished writing, after Eddie had done his stretches, and they’d gone down to the basement to figure out how to use the movie theater. But then they’d gotten into an argument over which movie had scared the shit out of Richie in the summer of 1988 (“Fuck you, it was not _The Blob_ , I had _taste_ even back then. It had to be _They Live_.” “Nah, dickhead, _They Live_ came out in the winter. You kept pretending your glasses were like the ones in the movie and kept taking them off like an idiot and you fell face first into a snow pile. It was _The Blob._ ”) and the only room in the basement that got any fucking service to Google movie release dates was the podcast room.

And Richie is incapable of being in the room with a microphone without turning it on. The conversation, once Richie realized he’d been wrong, had fallen swiftly to other things, like their first male celebrity crushes (“I really want it to be Bruce Willis in _Die Hard_.” “And the truth?” “....Kevin Kline in _A Fish Called Wanda…_ ”) (“It’s the only time Alec Baldwin looked good! Google it! Fucking Google him in _Beetlejuice_ and tell me I’m fucking wrong!”) or the salad Eddie had made Richie eat this afternoon (“Okay, so I’m not _allergic_ , but people look at you weird if you say, yeah, blue cheese makes me shit myself more than any other cheese and I don’t know why. See? See the look on your face? People just fucking nod and smile when you just say _allergic_ , they don’t give a shit.”). And now, somehow, the subject of shoes.

“It’s _not_ a weird sexual thing. If I’m sitting down, my shoes are coming off. That’s just the way I roll.”

“But. But you just mean, like, at home, right? Because if you just mean at home, then that isn’t even worth mentioning, and the fact that you’re mentioning it and being so defensive about it makes me think—”

“No! Anywhere! I don’t like shoes!”

Eddie looks absolutely livid, like he’s arguing about climate change with a tamagotchi. “But not — fucking — _anywhere_ anywhere. You can’t—”

“Anywhere.”

“What about work?”

“Unless I’m in front of cameras or an audience, yes I take them the fuck off.”

“The— the movies?”

“Lights go down, off they go. I’ll kick em all the way across the theater, I don’t give a fuck.”

“What about at a restaurant?” Eddie seems ready to jump on the table and start smashing the microphone to pieces. “What about at a fucking restaurant?”

“I have,” Richie says, leaning back in his chair. “I do. One time, I took my shoes off at a restaurant for dinner. I think it was an Applebee’s. I sat down, ate dinner, paid my bill, and then left. Only I left my shoes behind.”

Eddie freezes, like a deer who’s just heard a snap deep in the woods. “You. You left your shoes. Behind.”

Richie nods. “I left them under the table. I didn’t realize it until I got to the parking lot that I was barefoot.”

“What.” Eddie needs a moment. Richie gives it to him. “What. How. The _fuck._ What did you _do_?”

“I went back and got them,” Richie says, like it’s obvious, with a half-shrug. “It was a little fucking awkward, though. There was already a new family seated at my table, so I had to ask them to move so I could get my shoes.”

The enraged look on Eddie’s face lingers like a thundercloud, and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, as though he suddenly gets an image of what had occurred in the Applebee’s, the look disappears completely. He leans back in his chair, throws his head back, and _laughs._ It’s like a dam bursting, his hand clutching his belly the way they used to when they were eleven and Richie and Bill would compete to make the most realistic fart sounds without _actually_ farting, and none of them were really any good so Richie would make up weird foods you’d have to eat to get farts that sounded like that, and Eddie had laughed so hard his face went red and he started crying and he never once reached for his inhaler, and Georgie had been there too and he only really half understood why it was funny but he kept looking at Eddie and trying to laugh like he was, and then Stan had shown them all up by doing the most perfect fart noise with his lips, saying it was no different than some bird calls, and they’d all collapsed in Bill’s backyard, trying to mimic it, except Eddie who was laughing too hard.

Richie remembers being struck by the power inherent in making someone laugh, except it wasn’t just someone, it was _Eddie,_ and he’d only sort of knew back then what Eddie’s mom had been like. What she’d been working to try and take away from him. And before he even really got what it truly meant about himself or what he feels, he remembers thinking, _It’s a good thing to make Eddie laugh like that. Do it more._

So he did. He does.

Eddie has tears in his eyes again. “You’re so fucking _dumb,_ Richie, oh my _god._ How can you be so smart and so _dumb_.” He can’t even finish whatever point he’s about to make, because he’s laughing again. “I’m gonna put that in the group chat.”

“They’ll just have to listen to the podcast episode,” Richie says cheerfully, euphoric under Eddie’s laugh. He’s like a sunflower, bending towards the sun.

“Oh god,” says Eddie, but he’s grinning, “don’t even joke about that, dick. No one wants to hear any of this.”

“Fuck off, this is our next career. Gonna get that big podcasting money. Applebee’s, if you’re listening, please sponsor us.”

Eddie’s still chuckling. He starts to take off his sling. Richie loses whatever words he’s going to say next, watching Eddie stretch out his neck, the unconscious twitch of his fingers on the table, the tear hanging in the corner of one eye.

“Do you want to hear about the dumbest thing I ever did?” he asks suddenly, because the moment he’s thinking of is about to be usurped by jumping over the table and placing his tongue on the vein in Eddie’s neck. He decides to do something equally stupid and press his bare foot into Eddie’s knee under the table, nudging him back a little in his rolling chair. He remembers all the excuses he’d made back then to touch Eddie. He’d thought he was so cunning, so sly, moving like a Secret Double Agent, touching Eddie’s skin without anyone knowing the reason why. God, he’d been so brave back then. When did he turn into such a chickenshit?

“Yes,” says Eddie, inching back over to the table. His ears are red. “Obviously.”

“It takes place in the worst place in the world.”

“The DMV?”

“Wh—yes. How the fuck did you know that?”

“Because it’s the worst place in the fucking world. Is this from your act? Should I be preparing for a bit right now.”

“Nah, it’s true, it’s not from a show,” Richie says. “It’s actually mine.” His heart races at that, at admitting that on the record, even one he’s going to destroy said record later. Most stories comedians tell never actually happened or they’re greatly embellished, but of the good comics, they’re _theirs_ and that makes it true in a way Richie hasn’t been in a very long time.

Eddie leans back. “Tell your story, dipshit.”

Richie also leans back. Then he sits up a moment, wrestles the mic out of its stand, and then leans back in his chair again. He puts his bare feet on the table, just to make Eddie gag dramatically.

“Well— is this on? Did I just break it? What the fuck, it doesn’t matter. Anyway, I was 23, and I had just moved to LA. I thought I’d try my hand at TV comedy writing, but I was working at a movie theater on Vine and doing typical butt monkey PA shit.”

“God,” Eddie says, and his voice is a little funny. “I’m trying to imagine you at 23.”

“I was a heartthrob,” Richie assures him. “I could have taken Leo on if I wanted to, and this was like in 99 so it was _primo_ Leo. _Titanic_ Leo.”

“Uh huh,” Eddie says, understanding. “So an awkward fucker, just with more acne.”

“Fuck you, I was beautiful. _Anyway,_ the point I was _gonna_ make, is that I was 23, working shit jobs, in LA, so I was completely broke. I think it’s a little unfair, actually, that the rest of you guys went to instantly rich and successful without having a broke ass period like myself, but whatever. _Whatever_. I was driving around in. Okay. Do you remember the LeBaron?”

Eddie, among all his other lovely idiosyncrasies, is a total gear head. He frowns. “A Chrysler?”

“Yeah,” says Richie, and suddenly he can _feel_ the cheap, sun-melted leather of that car underneath him. “I had a 1992 LeBaron, and there’s absolutely no good fucking reason this car was still on the road, right? It was a piece of shit the minute they put it out. It was the convertible, this ugly grayish white that was probably just grime. The back windows were plastic, or they might have been at one point. Eventually they were just gone, and I used duct tape over them, and rain always got in so the back seat was just. Mold. And spiders. Someone once cut the top open with a knife and stole my tape player. I also duct taped that. Eddie, you look like a vein is about to burst in your forehead. Do you smell burning toast? How many risks have you just calculated?”

“How—” Eddie croaks, “ —how are you still _alive_?”

“It’s not for lack of trying,” Richie says, and continues quickly, before Eddie could say something else. “So, yeah. Shitty fucking car. But I needed it and I couldn’t afford anything else, so. But the point was, I was broke and I had a car, which meant eventually, the tags on the license plate expired and of course, I couldn’t afford to go get new ones for a few months.”

“Jesus, Rich, they’re like fifty bucks.”

“Yeah, fifty _whole dollars_. Valuable food or rent or gas or weed or literally any other fucking thing dollars. But finally I got pulled over for it and I was like, ohhhh my god, I’m so sorry, I’m _literally_ on my way to the DMV right now, I promise. And because I’m charming as _fuck_ this dumb cop believed me. He followed me all the way to the DMV to make sure I was going there, but he did believe me.”

“Did you do a shitty fucking impression of his accent while you were charming him?”

“ _No,_ because obviously I didn’t remember that was a thing I _do_ until just now. So anyway, I’m stuck at the DMV. Fortunately, I’d been on my way home from work and not the other way around or I would have gotten fired ten times over. Unfortunately, I had been on my way to my dealer, so valuable money that had better purposes, that was now being stuck on a bunch of stupid stickers.”

“I feel like you’re trying to shock me every time you talk about weed. Your eyebrows keep doing a thing.”

“No— well. Are you?”

Eddie scoffs. “Like it’s not the most obvious thing about you? No I’m not fucking shocked. Are you shocked I used to sell my Adderall in college?”

“You— _what?_ ”

“What? Just the ones I didn’t take myself.”

“Eddie _Kaspbrak_ , that’s _drugs_. You were a _drug dealer_.”

“Gee, and thanks for saying my full fucking name while saying that. I was just _enterprising_. Kids needed help studying, so…”

“Oh my god. No, my story is stupid now. Talk about the Kaspbrak Speed Emporium, please.”

“No, keep going. I want to hear about this super exciting DMV story, it’s great so far.”

“Fuck you. Fine... I got my fucking stickers. Of course, by the time I get out of there, it’s about to start raining. So I’m just going to slap these puppies on and get the hell outta the rain. So I go out into the parking lot, and I get on my knees — now, relax there, Eduardo — I get on my knees, and there’s like. A layer of dirt so fucking thick on my license plate, okay? Okay? I’m not proud. Who the fuck notices how much dirt is on a license plate? And like, I’m a former _skateboarder_. I’m a former mallrat. I know for a fact that a sticker won’t stick unless the surface is clean. And the last thing I fucking need is these fucking fifty dollar _stickers_ to fall off.

“So I’m on my knees in the parking lot, and I’m like rubbing the license plate in my hand. Getting _real_ gross. And then. Well. I start to peel off the old stickers.”

“What? You just put them on top.”

“I _know_ that. I _know_ that now. But at the time, I was getting wet and dirty and my knees were killing me on the pavement and I wasn't thinking. So I start trying to peel off one of the stickers and they just won’t fucking come off no matter what I do. I’m pulling and scratching until finally I get one corner off. Then I go to work on the second one. Okay, I’ve literally been there for like twenty minutes, working on this stupid license plate. And so I’m working on removing a second tag and then suddenly I hear this guy go, Can I help you with something?

“And I look up and there’s this guy. Okay. He wasn’t scary because he was big. I’ve known a lot of big guys who are cupcakes. This guy was a big guy, and he was scary because he had a big fucking snake tattoo on his neck. And he had this razor thin goatee, and unironic steel-toe cowboy boots, and — god I remember this so clearly. A cream colored suit with like. A — Purple — what do you call it? Those fucking little scarves.”

“....An ascot?”

“Yeah! A fucking _ascot._ Everything about him was so ridiculous, but that goddamn snake tattoo and the boots was like, okay _this_ guy knows how to have people murdered. Like he can _have them_ _disappeared_. And he says to me, can I help you. Like. What the fuck. I _don’t_ think that’s how people get recruited into the mob but a part of me, just for an instant, was like, _is this it? Is it finally happening?_

“And then I’m just like, who the fuck does this guy think he is? _Can I help you with something?_ What, like I’m some weak little bitch who can’t even take off his own car stickers? Like a weak little bitch or something? I may have been skinny and soaked and on my knees, but I was not a weak little bitch! I’m over six feet tall! Fuck this guy, right?”

“You didn’t say that.” Eddie isn’t even asking a question.

“N--of course not, what am I, stupid? I was just like, Thanks pal but I think I got it. Literally. I'm ... pretty sure I actually called him pal. Like, not even a cool word like dude or man. _Pal._ And I turned back to my license plate. And I’m peeling away and I hear the guy’s boots grate on the gravel, and he says, Are you kidding me? Like, he had the tone of every single substitute teacher I’ve ever encountered. Disbelief, some amusement, some rage. Are you kidding me? he says, and I turn around on my heels again and that’s when I see it.”

“See what?”

“ _My car_.”

A silence falls over the podcast studio.

“So,” Richie says, scratching the back of his neck, “it would seem that in that DMV parking lot, there had been…. _another_ white convertible whose tags I had been. Uh. Removing. Belonging to that guy.”

Eddie still doesn’t say anything, and then he says, “Oh my god.”

“It was raining!” But there’s basically no point. Eddie can’t hear anything over his own laughter.

Richie has made Bill Murray laugh, once. He’s heard, through the grapevine, that Dame Judi Dench thought one of his comedy specials was amusing. These are the highlights of his career. They pale in comparison to making a tiny, neurotic risk analyst from Derry, Maine laugh.

“It was raining!” Richie says again, just because it makes Eddie holler. “I wasn’t paying attention!”

“Was it — was it a LeBaron too?”

“No, I think it was a….” This part is just embarrassing. “A Mustang?” A really nice one, too.

“A _Mustang!_ ” That sets Eddie off again, because he must know that even a shitty Mustang is still nicer than a nice LeBaron, and that’s not even what Richie had. “Were the tags even fucking _expired_?”

“....No. _Listen._ ”

“You, like, thoroughly examined those things!”

“Listen.”

“Twenty fucking minutes!”

“I know, I—”

“How are you still _aliiiiive_ , how did that guy not fucking kill you.” He’s calmed down a little, mostly because he’s earnest in wanting to know how the fuck Richie cheated death.

“Well, you know, I had to play it right. I was inches from a pair of boots that would have left me brain-dead with one good kick. And this guy was looming over me, ready to do it, thinking the same thing I was thinking, which was _what the fuck is this dumb fucking fag doing to my car_ and he —-”

“Don’t.” Eddie flinches, all traces of his smile gone. “Hey. Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t call yourself… that,” he says, completely serious, “in that Voice.”

And Richie — stills. Everything in him freezes. Except his heart, suddenly racing throughout every part of his body. It’s suddenly like he’s got seashells against his ears. Like things are muted, coated, gray with fog, and he doesn’t even know _why._ It’s the same thing he heard on stage, after Mike’s call. Things far away, suddenly roaring back. “I wasn’t doing a Voice.”

Eddie looks at him for a long moment, clearly unsure if he wants to go on, clearly seeing _something_ in Richie’s face that’s making him afraid. But Eddie, it seems, is not about to let go of whatever it was that spurred him into action with the fence post down in the sewers. He’s afraid, but he’ll act anyway.

He says, “Richie. You called yourself that in Bowers’s voice.”

It’s either the words, or the gentleness of how they’re delivered, that makes Richie feel like the floor has dropped out of his stomach. He sits motionless for a moment, feels a sharp pain in his eyes, says, “I—” and runs out of the room.

His eyes feel tight and rough in their sockets, his vision blurring, and he thinks first he’s going blind before he realizes he’s just crying. He’s never gone from fine to sobbing that fast before, and he can’t stop. He doesn’t even know _how_ to stop _._ He doesn’t know what’s happening. He stumbles down the hallway and winds up in the zen garden, which isn’t currently living up to its fucking name at all.

He staggers inside and immediately trips into a pit of lined sand. He stays on his hands and knees, feeling the harsh grit under his palms and feeling the Derry schoolyards and the Derry quarry and the Derry scrutiny that has lived under his fucking skin like a dormant virus. He cries. He takes off his glasses and cries.

Eventually, he feels the hand soothing on his back, although he thinks it’s been there the whole time. He has no idea how long he’s been here in the sand. He takes deep breaths, tears still falling, rocks back on his heels, and then turns over so he’s sitting in the sand with his knees up, perfect for burying his head. Distantly he notices that the usual aches and pains of adulthood are gone. He moves fluidly, unthinkingly, like he has the body of a child again.

Eddie’s hand is now resting on his shin. Everything is a blur, but he can see Eddie looks painfully sad, so sad Richie can’t stand it. He keeps his face buried in his knees, the denim rough on his face.

“Jesus,” he says, near hyperventilating. “Jesus. What the fuck is wrong with me.”

“Nothing,” says Eddie immediately. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Except for the shoe thing.”

Richie manages a watery laugh. “I— I fucking use that….that Voice all the _time_ , man. In my fucking _head._ Like when I’m being stupid or thinking…. I don’t know, _gay thoughts,_ and like. Every fucking bad thing I’ve ever thought about myself. And it’s— _him_? You sure ...?” But he sees Eddie’s expression and he has to hide his face again, a sob escaping from deep inside him.

Eddie doesn’t say anything, but he runs his hand through Richie’s hair, making Richie shiver. Slowly, softly, he forces Richie to look at him. He cups Richie’s cheek like he doesn’t trust him to keep his head up. He doesn’t say anything, though, just gently wipes the tears from Richie’s face and smooths back his hair.

Richie closes his eyes. “You ever just feel so fucking tired of your own bullshit?”

“Yes,” says Eddie. “Constantly.” Then he says, “How do you think I wound up here?”

Richie finally gives in and leans into Eddie’s hand on his face. “I’m so tired of myself, dude. I don’t want to be this asshole anymore.”

“Hey,” Eddie says sternly, giving his face a little shake. Richie opens his eyes. The only thing that’s bright and sharp is Eddie, like always. He’s fiercely serious when he says, “You’re _not_ an asshole. You’re annoying as shit and you never know when to stop sometimes and you pretend you’re dumb even though you’re probably smarter than all of us and it’s gotten so you don’t even know _how_ to be smart anymore which makes you probably the most frustrating person on the _planet,_ but you’re not an asshole. You’re not _cruel_ , Rich. Not to anyone but yourself. You’re a better person than you think you are.”

Unfortunately, all this just makes Richie start to cry again. He feels the tear run hot down his face onto Eddie’s hands.

“I think I fucked up,” he says miserably, crooking his head. Eddie’s fingers curl behind his ear. “Kissing you. Getting us hurt so we had to leave the sewer early. The others, they got to — to kill that fucker. They got to crush Its fucking heart, man, and we had to run out of there, and now they’re not afraid of anything. They’re not afraid to be happy and be themselves and kiss and shit and I’m still fucking terrified. I’m so goddamn scared, Eds. I think I really fucked up. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

It’s like he can now see the shape of the thing that’s been sitting in his throat the last couple weeks, clamming him up. The fear that has outlined his entire life — that colored his youth, that erased his growth, that’s flooded his mind since Mike’s phone call — it’s never left. Even hearing that Its dead isn’t enough, because he only _heard_ about it. He’d been hiding who he is for years out of cowardice. Then when the Deadlights showed him how lonely he’d be forever, he’d almost convinced himself it was an act of bravery, kissing Eddie. But it just turned into another chance to run, and to let the fear inside fester. And now he’ll never get a chance to rid himself of it like the others did. And he’d robbed Eddie of the chance, too.

“Jesus Christ, Richie,” Eddie says after a moment. He shifts on his knees without letting go of Richie’s face. “Stop being so goddamn literal. Most people don’t need to kill a demonic fear alien to get over their anxieties, dude.”

Richie — pouts. “Oh, well, then what _do_ they do, _geniu—_ ”

Eddie kisses him.

The thing about Richie is — he’s the only one who could ever keep up with Eddie.

Most people never truly understood how to deal with him. He was so small, but like, the way a firecracker was small. Not much to look at, at first. But you better fucking scram the second you lit the fuse, unless you were a dumbass like Richie, who would take every opportunity to cut the fuse, then light it, then hold it in his hand for as long as possible, just to feel the heat of the explosion on him. Richie likes to think he played a small part in helping Eddie realize he wasn’t as fragile as his mom insisted, at least for a little while. It got to a point where it had been truly impossible to tell who started their arguments, contests, jokes, pissing matches, insults, and the occasional conversation, but they usually needed someone else to stop it. Richie could have kept going forever.

Richie can keep kissing Eddie forever, too.

He takes the time to notice all the things he hadn’t before, what with all the Terror. The softness of Eddie’s bottom lip against his own, the rough stubble, the hitched inhale. And the new things, Eddie’s hand clutching his neck, the barest hint of tongue against the corner of his mouth, the smell of him not covered by sewage and shit. Richie lowers his knees to bring Eddie closer, holding him close by the back of his head.

But then he pulls back. “Wait,” he says. “No.”

Eddie blinks at him stupidly. His cheeks are bright pink, and his eyes widen when he catches up with Richie’s words. “No?”

“I wanted to do this — somewhere better,” Richie complains, sniffling, though he doesn’t let go of Eddie. “To cancel out the sewer. This is so much worse. I’m covered in my own snot and we’re in a _zen_ _garden._ I can’t kiss you like this, it’s terrible.”

Eddie stares at him for a long time. Richie can actually feel his neck redden with anger beneath his hand. “Y’know what? You are an asshole sometimes. Come on.” He stands up suddenly, and without the touch of him on Richie’s skin, he feels cold and unusual, as though he’s lived his whole life with the feeling and not just the last few minutes. “Pull yourself up, my shoulder hurts,” Eddie demands, and waits until Richie has his glasses on and is standing before grabbing him by the wrist. “Come _on._ ”

On their way out, Richie stops. Or as much as he can with Eddie pulling him. “Why is all the alcohol in here?”

“Because I didn’t think you’d ever willingly come in here,” Eddie says, like it’s obvious. “Let’s go.”

He drags them all the way upstairs and pushes them into the kitchen, where he turns on the sink. “Wash your face.”

“What?”

“Do it.”

“...In the kitchen sink?”

“Did I fucking _stutter?_ ”

So Richie takes off his glasses again and washes his face. It’s cold and feels unbearably good, fresher than any other water he’s felt. He’s about to put his glasses back on, but suddenly Eddie is there, drying him with a soft, clean hand towel. “Good?” he asks sarcastically, but the tone is belied by the gentleness and thoroughness of his movements. When he’s done, Richie no longer feels swollen and aching by the words he said, by the Voice, by himself. He feels clean.

Then Eddie takes him by the wrist again, and by the time they make it out onto the veranda, Eddie no longer looks pissed off. The sun is setting over the mountains, and it’s one of those clear, cloudless days that make everything orange and navy before night finally falls. The moon is out already, hovering small and patient against the smooth, warm night. And it’s all alive around them, the smell of growing fir trees and a creek rushing nearby and crickets waking from the brush and birds drifting to sleep with a song still on their beaks. It reminds Richie of being young, of curling beneath his bedroom window, and even though his bed had been so comfortable and his blankets so soft, he’d lean on his windowsill and think about the Barrens, and wish he was still out in the woods with his friends and being wild, the way boys are supposed to be.

Eddie also needs a moment, it seems, to look at the view. He turns to Richie. “There, Princess. Is this a better _backdrop_ for you, or do you need me to scatter some fucking rose petals, too?”

Richie kisses him, because it _is_ better. And he’s starting to realize that, even if it’s not, he might have more opportunities later on to get it right.

A little while later, the sun is totally gone. They’re only lit by the moon now, all the lights inside having been off with no one around to turn them on. Eddie is lying on a patio chair, and Richie is half on top of him, which in itself is a minor miracle. Richie feels awkward and large and gawky just moving past someone in the aisle of an airplane. But he doesn’t feel uncomfortable. He’s not afraid of how he looks. He’s not thinking about his body at all, only Eddie’s.

Eddie’s got a hand carding through Richie’s hair again, and is looking up at the sky. There are stars out here. Richie hasn’t seen stars since he was a kid.

“I don’t think you fucked up, Richie,” Eddie says, his voice hushed for no particular reason. “I don’t know why exactly, but I think you kissing me might have saved my life.”

The thing about Richie is — he used to try and make jokes and hope people understood what he was doing, what he was trying to say. How he was feeling. That someone might see them for what they were and look deeper, to try and figure out all the things Richie could never know how to say. It’s never worked, not really.

Maybe kissing might do the trick. He gives it a shot, leaning up and pulling Eddie down by the back of the neck. He presses his lips to Eddie’s and speaks, speaks, speaks, and says the things he’d been saying and trying to say to Eddie all those years ago, and says the things he’s been saying and trying to say since he first saw Eddie again, decades later. He spills them out across the floor, but they’re too close for there to be much floor between them. He opens his mouth and gives Eddie his tongue like this is the only thing he needs to say, like he has no other use for it after this.

Eddie takes it. Eddie listens. Eddie hears him.

* * *

_“..._

_…_

_…_

_…_

_… Ugh._

_I need to go the fuck to sleep. I shouldn’t be doing this shit. I don’t know why I can’t sleep._

_My face feels funny. It, like, aches. Is this how happy people feel all the time? Ugh. God._

_I finally got him to sleep in a fucking bed tonight. Not that we_ did _anyth— We just watched TV and he fell asleep. In my arms. I’ve never…_

_I’ve always been the one held, is all. It felt…_

_I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing._ Literally. _Like. With any of this. With him. With talking in this fucking thing. I think it’s because I haven’t spoken to my therapist in awhile._

_…_

_Jesus. I can never speak to him again._

_Like, what the fuck. ‘Hey, doc, it’s been a few weeks since we spoke! Oh, what’s new? I finally poked my head out the fucking closet and left my wife and oh yeah I was nearly fucking murdered and almost lost my arm. How? Well an evil fucking clown who murdered a bunch of kids in my hometown when I was a kid was back murdering a bunch of kids in my hometown and it just seemed like a job for a five foot nine risk analyst with psychosomatic asthma. But it’s fine now because I finally got to make out with my middle school crush and I felt his boner through his jeans and my first thought was, this is definitely worth being stabbed twice over. Oh yeah I also got stabbed. In the FACE.’_

_Christ. He’d lock me up so fast. I’m sorry, Dr. Edling, but none of my breakthroughs have been your doing._

_I guess this is a fucking breakthrough. That’s why I’m still fucking smiling._

_Even though it’s four in the goddamn morning. I just want to sleep. But. Every time I sleep I see that fucking — thing on top of Richie. I’m back in the sewer. And I don’t move. It’s not even a fucking dream. I_ didn’t _move. That really fucking happened. I’m just stuck in that same fucking moment. Even though, actually, a lot worse things happened after that, it’s the one fucking thing I can’t shake._

_His hand on my shoulder. God. I couldn’t even look him in the eye._

_…_

_How the fuck do you forgive someone for that? How can he look at me and not be disgusted?_

_God. He really is a dumbass._

_And the annoying thing, the real fucking annoying thing, is that. I can let this go, when he’s around. When he’s looking at me, when he’s against me. God, when I kissed him…._

_I can’t fucking believe I did that._

_But like. I don’t think about any of it. It all goes away. He’s like my fucking inhaler. I can breathe again. I’m not worried about what I’m eating, or how clean every surface is. He was like that, when we were kids. He always got me thinking of other things. Better things. Annoying things, but they’re all better than what I’m like when I’m alone._

_But. I can’t be with him every second of the day. He needs to sleep. I need to sleep._

_I’ve always. I don’t know. I’ve needed. I’m needy. I need things to be exactly right. I needed my mom to keep me safe. I needed My— my wife to keep me safe. And now, I need him. God. I need him._

_But is it a_ good _need? Is there such a thing? Am I just doing the same bullshit again? Finding someone to take care of me?_

 _God. I’m so fucked up. There_ must _be a difference between love and need, right?_

_My mom loved me. My— my wife loved me. And they both screwed me up so bad. What’s the fucking difference, then?_

_I don’t know. Maybe it’s the way they needed_ me. _Maybe that’s what’s different._

_I think Richie needs me in the same way that I do. I mean. Not to toot my own fucking horn or anything, but I’m honestly not sure how he’s survived this fucking long without me. The shoe thing alone…_

_…_

_I’m smiling again. God fucking damn it._

_…_

_Maybe that’s the difference._

_I have to go to sleep. I don’t want to, though._

_But. I guess I do want to go to bed._

_My face does fucking hurt. God._

_…_

_Oh Jesus fucking Christ. Is it_ beard burn _?”_

* * *

Richie wakes up absolutely drenched in sweat. His left arm — his only unstabbed arm — is completely dead under him. His left temple also feels numb and staticy, like it had been up against a wall all night instead of a very soft mattress. His face is fully mashed into Eddie’s sternum, his mouth cottony and full of his t-shirt. A heavy arm is draped over his shoulder, fully pining him in place.

It’s the most well-rested Richie has ever felt.

In the hospital, he’d bribed Bill to bring him a bottle of whiskey so they could toast their survival, and he’d managed to squirrel it away before anyone thought to take it back. It wasn’t enough to make him black out each night, but the combination with his pain medicine helped at the time. He _doesn’t_ have a substance abuse problem. He has a terror problem. He doesn’t _just_ have an anxiety problem. He has proof that all his fears can and have been physically manifested and have literally tried to murder him. Excuse the fuck out of him for needed a little assistance getting over his insomnia.

But last night, he’d fallen asleep completely sober. Not to get disgustingly romantic and barf worthy up in here, but kissing Eddie had been debilitating in its own right. It’s certainly addicting enough. And clearly Eddie had a problem with him drinking, since he hid everything without actually having a conversation with Richie, like a big baby. That’s probably why he kissed Richie in the first place. To avoid the bitching Richie would have rightly done when he realized. Whatever. It worked.

Once again, it’s only near-dawn. Eddie picked a room that faces east, and the sun starts creeping in like a second thought, still unsure if it’ll bother rising today. It’s the kind of time that you’re supposed to ignore — to avert your eyes immediately and drift back off to sleep. But as soon as Richie registers the fact that it’s _Eddie’s_ waist his arm is around, _Eddie’s_ knees his leg is slipped between, he goes from zero to fully fucking awake in less than sixty seconds.

Eddie assured him last night that he’s not an asshole. Richie almost believed him. But his first instinct is always to _be_ an asshole, and so even though it’s early as fuck, he just wants to wake Eddie up and annoy him. And maybe. Kiss him a bunch, but mostly he wants to annoy him.

But then the light is finally enough for him to see the dark shadows under Eddie’s eyes, spread beneath his eyelashes like paper fans, and he can’t do it. He remembers drifting off to sleep last night, the TV murmuring some other reality show drama he didn’t absorb, too focused on his bare ankles against Eddie’s bare ankles. He thinks Eddie was still probably awake when he fell asleep, although he’d been yawning like crazy, and he doesn’t remember being woken up by a nightmare. Who knows how long Eddie’s actually slept? Richie wants to sleep and usually can’t, and Eddie just doesn’t seem to want to. Perfect fucking match.

Slowly, gently, with great remorse but with a greater need to piss, he untangles himself from Eddie. Eddie huffs in his sleep, his hand gripping the warm place where Richie’s body had just been. Richie can’t help but lean down and press a kiss into his knuckles. He smiles at the way Eddie’s sleep-frown disappears.

After a shower and getting the coffee going, he goes out onto the patio. He’s got his notepad filled with jokes and his ancient laptop and rows and rows of evergreens before him and a handsome, sleepy man behind him in a fucking mansion in the mountains. He almost wishes he was Instagram-famous. This is hashtag fucking goals right here.

He writes and rewrites until the sun is finally ready to concede that it is, in fact, day, murmuring under his breath the whole time. Trying to find the right inflections, the right pauses, when to not use contractions, when to use _fuck_ over _goddamn_ , when to be serious, which details seem the most specific but also the most universal. It’s like a puzzle, one he used to do naturally until it got the slightest bit too hard and so he just gave it up entirely. He’s such an idiot. The hard parts are the best parts.

Finally, after a few hours at it, his phone rings. But when he sees who it is, his annoyance at being interrupted vanishes instantly.

“Big Billy Style!” he shouts into his phone. “How’s it hanging?”

A pause, and then, “Ugh. I thought I’d be calling you early enough for you to be at a lower volume.”

“ _I don’t know what you’re talking about,_ ” he says in a very loud and patriotic voice. “ _This is just how we speak out here in the Golden West_.”

“ _Stop_ ,” Bill says, laughing. “You’re going to cause an a-a-avalanche or something.”

“It’s summer.”

“Still. You’ll attract bears.”

“The only one attracting _bears_ out here is _Eddie_ , _hey-yoooo.”_

Bill snorts. “Y-yeah, right.”

“What? I’m totally a bear, dude! Fuck you! I’m — hairy.”

“Ri-rich, I’ve seen your hairline.”

“Oh, Big Bill gets off a good one! You’re in no place to talk though, you goddamn hypocrite. I know you’re only with your rich Hollywood wife because she keeps you in rogaine and hair transplants.”

“Also love,” Bill says easily.

Richie makes a fart sound, but that word out of Bill makes him think he’s going to mention the Eddie thing that Richie slyly slipped into the conversation, and just because he brought it up doesn’t mean he’s in the mood to evaluate it. “Hey, Bill, I’m writing again! I’m writing right now, actually. I think I might make a book. I— “

“ _M-make_ a book? Rich—”

“I figure, if you can do it, it can’t be that hard.”

“Like a novel?”

“ _No_. I think a memoir.” He’s actually been working on new stand-up material, but he doesn’t hate the idea of a book. “All the big comedy people these days come out with memoirs. Mindy Kaling has one. I’ve always said I’m like a young Mindy Kaling.”

“You… are not,” Bill says kindly. “Are you j-just going to skip over your whole childhood? Because it’s either completely absent or totally insane.”

“I think I remember most stuff now,” says Richie defensively. “And the crazy shit, that’s what _metaphors_ are for, you fucking hack. Pennywise the dancing clown? Obviously an analogy for that trauma of nearly drowning in a ball pit at McDonald’s when I was five. Duh.”

Bill laughs, but he doesn’t say anything, and the moment gets quiet. Richie thinks he might be calling just to say hi, but he’s not sure they’re really there yet. Daily, random messages in a group text are different. He fiercely hopes they’ll all be close like they once were, that they won’t just forget each other once the memories of Derry fade the way regular memories do. But there’s no guarantee. They all have to figure out the kinds of people they are now.

Bill says, eventually, “Hey, are you getting your mail forwarded to you?”

“My mail?” Richie frowns. “No. What the fuck for?” Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons? To cash his residuals for the few episodes of _The King of Queens_ he wrote that are still in syndication? “Is there an invite I forgot to RSVP to?”

“No…” He trails off, and then takes a deep breath. “I got a letter. From. From Stan. Mike got one too. I think. I guess he sent it to all of us.”

The sun is baking the back of Richie’s neck, but he suddenly feels cold inside. Ice cold. Like all the blood inside him has gone. Like he’s completely hollow inside, and the wind’s just blowing through. “From Stan?” And his voice sounds just as empty. “ _Stan_?”

“Yeah,” says Bill. Richie doesn’t know if he’s still in England, if he’s back in California, if he’s staring at some misty moor or blinking at the same sun as Richie, if he’s in the future or the past. Wherever he is, he sounds sad. “Yeah. He — Mike got the same one I did, s-so I guess he wr-wrote them out for all of us, and then. I guess Patty…”

Richie slams his laptop shut, unable to stand looking at his dumb jokes anymore. Christ, _Patty_. “What — I mean, what does…”

“I can r-read it to you,” Bill says, “if you don’t want to. To wait for your own.”

“Yeah,” says Richie. “Fuck it. It’s a beautiful morning. I got to kiss Eddie again last night. But yeah, read me one of my best friend’s suicide notes. That’s what I want to do.”

“Richie…”

“No, I’m serious, Bill,” he says. He closes his eyes, not wanting to see the sky. “Read it to me.”

“Well, he starts out by saying it’s not a suicide note.”

Richie snorts. “Contradictory little asshole.”

“Yeah,” Bill agrees with a small laugh. “Only if it’s you t-talking.”

Bill reads the letter. It’s not very long, but Richie feels like he’s listening to it for a lifetime. He doesn’t even know what Stan looked like grown up. So he just keeps picturing him like that fucking little kid, with his dumb curly hair and button-down shirts. A dumb skinny kid writing this letter. Writing this letter _six times_. A dumb skinny kid in his Shabbat best and his serious brow that made all his jokes unexpected and so fucking hilarious, writing these letters like he’s in detention, with the thought in his mind, _I’m doing this before I kill myself in a bathtub._

“How,” Richie croaks when he’s done, into the silence that followed, “how the fuck did he write that? _When?_ After Mike called? I didn’t fucking remember _any_ of you guys until I saw you at that restaurant. I only barely grasped everyone’s first name. Even _Eddie_. And Stan — what? Fucking remembered enough to write _that_? To remember us? Did he fucking research our fucking addresses too? He wrote this out _six times_ and fucking _Googled us_ without every pausing to think _, hey, this seems like a lot of fucking work, maybe I shouldn’t fucking slit my fucking wrists open?_ What the _fuck_ , Bill? Who has that kind of fucking— resolve? Like, the one fucking time I—” He stops.

He’s standing by the edge of the patio, gripping the railing tightly. He doesn’t remember getting up at all.

Bill says, “Richie…”

Richie squeezes his eyes shut. “Listen, just. Just fucking ignore I said that, alright? It was a long time ago. And an accident. Mostly. It’s _fine_.”

Bill doesn’t say anything for a long time, and then he says, “Okay.”

There’s still a hand pressing down hard against his lungs. “Okay?”

“We’ve all got our own stuff, Rich. I get it. I didn’t just forget you guys, y’know? I forgot _Georgie_. That f-fucker took Georgie from me in every way It could. So I didn’t even remember being a b-big brother, and that made me. I dunno. Cold. Distant. That’s what every girlfriend called me, in the end, until Audra. Y’know, I only ever tr-tried to be a good p-person so as to be a good example for… for him. I’d forgotten h-how to take care of someone else, and for a long time I thought I was just. Just broken.”

Richie lets out a deep breath. He’s able to, now that the hand is gone. “Yeah. Yeah okay, Bill. I know what you mean.” Then he adds, “Nice humblebrag, by the way, slipping in all your ex-girlfriends. You stud.”

“Beep, beep, Richie,” Bill says, but he sounds a little lighter now. “I don’t want to go back to how my life was b-before. Without you guys. We only have each other to talk to about this shit, so we gotta make sure we do it. Whenever we need to.”

“Yeah,” says Richie. “You’re right. Intergalactic Fuckface Survivors Anonymous. Actually, I bet if we put an ad for that in the Derry newspaper, people would actually show up. That town is so fucked up.”

“It is,” Bill agrees. “So. I mean. Do you want me to call Eddie and. And tell him about th-the letter? Or do you…”

“No, don’t call him,” he says. “He’s. Uh. Still asleep. Just. You can text me a photo of it, and I’ll explain and read it to him.”

“Okay. L-listen. What you said, I don’t really know how… how Stan could have written these, could have sent them, with _that_ in his head. I don’t really understand. But _what_ he said…. It’s important for us to remember. Don’t be mad at him.”

“I’m not—” But Richie can’t finish that sentence.

They speak a little longer, talking about going to visit Ben and Bev in Arkansas, how Mike is already starting a slow road trip to them, but both Richie and Bill are not really paying attention to what each other is saying anymore. It’s a quieter goodbye than it was a hello.

A few minutes after getting off the call, his phone beeps with a message received. Richie doesn’t look at it. He has his laptop open, and it doesn’t take him too long to find Stanley Uris’s obituary.

He’s not mad at Stan. He’s _not_. He wants to be, he thinks, but he isn’t. He knows what can eat away at people, and what ate away at them _literally_ tried to eat them. He finds a picture of Stan, and he does look just like the boy Richie once knew, but taller. He’s smiling in his corporate headshot, and Richie can see the thin scars that circle his face from rows of sharp, inhuman teeth.

He said he spent his whole life afraid. But he had, by all accounts, a nice life. A lovely wife who seemed to cherish him, and from all the vacation photos on her Facebook page (Richie is fully stalking now), Stan seemed to cherish her, too. He had friends, scores of birdwatching club members coming out of the woodwork to memorialize him. He’d been good at his job, beloved by his coworkers and clients.

And yet, the fear killed him. With all that to cling to, the fear killed him in the end.

Richie thought he was afraid, but he’d never looked directly into the mouth of It like Stan had. Not even Beverly had. She’d also been hypnotized by the Deadlights, and Richie knows, looking at them is just seeing bright white and then a future too horrible to contemplate. But Stan had seen true horror when that monstrous woman had her jaws clamped on his face.

All he’d seen was a yawning throat, and an empty stomach.

“Stan the Man,” Richie murmurs, clicking through condolence comment after condolence comment, before closing the browser in an angry haste, leaving open just his new jokes. “‘Be proud.’ Fuck, I’m trying, man.” He guesses that’s the best he can do.

His motivation to write is completely gone, as is the drive to stand up and eat breakfast and get on with his day. He sits out on the patio until his shitty laptop battery dies, just staring out at the landscape. Birds swoop down every once in awhile, too far and too fast for Richie to see any identifying characteristics, not that he’d know what to do with them if he saw them. But still. He sits and watches the birds.

He watches until Eddie comes out, startling him with a gentle, “Hey.”

Richie looks at him over his shoulder. He’s already dressed in his little workout number, sans sling, but this time he’s got some sneakers on. Richie hasn’t seen them before. They feature some incredible neon. Eddie smiles at him.

“Hey,” Richie says, his own smile only dragging on one side. “You going somewhere?”

“Yeah, I…” Eddie looks down, looking almost shy. “I thought you might want to go for a run or something. My shoulder feels better today.”

“Oh,” says Richie. “Oh, no. Sorry. You missed that. You totally missed that. That was a one time thing.”

Eddie gives Richie his usual bitchface, coming around so he’s standing in front of him. “A one time thing? Running is good for you.”

“It most certainly isn’t.”

“There are _studies_.”

“No one has studied _me._ I am never running again. Not even for Pennywise. Not even for a bus.” He holds up his hand to stop whatever indignation is brewing. “I might, however, be a walker.”

Eddie stops. “A… a walker?”

“Yeah. Like. Go on walks. That shit.”

“Oh.” The tips of Eddie’s ears are red. “Do you… do you want to go for a walk? With me?”

“Oh.” Richie thinks about the beautiful path he walked yesterday, how it inspired him, and he thinks, too, about their drive up here, and Eddie ranting about poison ivy and bears and the risk of hitting a pedestrian on the narrow, winding roads. And now, he’s asking to _be_ the pedestrian. He wants to walk with Richie. Maybe they could walk in comfortable silence. Richie’s never experienced one of those, but he’s heard good things. Maybe they could hold hands. “Yes. Yeah, I do. But.” He sighs. “Listen, I just got off the phone with Bill, and I feel like if I sit on it you’ll be pissed off later, even though it’s a real bummer.”

Richie thinks his heart might actually break at the way Eddie’s face falls. “What?”

With a sigh, Richie grabs his phone and opens Bill’s text. His heart clenches, looking at Stan’s handwriting. He doesn’t remember what Stan’s handwriting used to look like, but he feels familiarity in the idea of making fun of him for having the neatest handwriting of all of them. But this letter looks a little shaky and rushed, like he’d written it already a few times before, like the thought of what he was planning to do once he put the last period down was finally hitting him.

He reads Stan’s letter to Eddie. It sounds worse in his own voice than in Bill’s. Less convincing. It feels even longer than listening to it, even though he can see it’s barely a page. Stan had automatically signed his name the way he probably signed receipts at restaurants, before adding _Stan_ beneath it, clear and understood.

When Richie is finally able to look at Eddie, he’s almost a little surprised by how white Eddie has gone. His eyes are wet with unshed tears, but they’re tears of frustration, his teeth clenched so hard Richie’s afraid they’ll break.

He says, “Eds,” but that’s as far as he gets before Eddie turns around, jumps down the three steps off the patio, and sprints out into the woods.

“Eddie!” he calls, springing from his chair in shock. Eddie runs so fast, he’s gone almost instantly, disappearing into the trees. “Fuck!”

Without thinking too hard about it, Richie runs off after him.

He has better visibility once he’s in the woods, the neon of Eddie’s sneakers and the lime green cuffs of his nylon hoodie bounding ahead in front of Richie. The house is built on a slope of the mountain, propelling them downhill, making Richie move faster than he probably ever has before.

“Ow, fuck, ow, ow,” Richie mutters, because of course, he’d just been chilling on the patio, so _of course_ he’s not wearing any fucking shoes. Just a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt. He can’t really stop, because gravity, so he bumps hard into a tree against his bad arm. “Ow, fuck! Eddie! Stop!” He doesn’t slow down.

He finally catches up with Eddie, who is bent over beside a thin creek. Richie starts to stop, the ground leveling a little, but then Eddie stands up straight and lets out a anguished, wordless scream.

“Jesus fuck!” Richie, surprised, slips in the dirt and lands back hard on his hands. Birds shudder through the trees as the scream echoes through the woods. He tries to be heard over it. “ _Eddie!”_

When Eddie turns around, his face is pale and vivid, two streaks of tears down his face. He’s breathing hard, too hard, his hands clenching and unclenching like he’s desperate to destroy something.

“‘ _Don’t,’_ ” Eddie gasps, his eyes wild and angry. “‘Don’t be afraid?’ What the _fuck_ , what the _fuck_ did Stan fucking know about being afraid? With his nice fucking parents? With his nice fucking _wife?_ Be who _the fuck_ you want to be? Like that’s ever been so fucking easy! What the fuck does _he_ know about it! Huh? That’s bullshit! It’s bullshit, Richie!”

Richie thinks about standing up, but he can’t figure out how to move. He sits there, in the dirt and leaves and sticks, resting back on his hands like he’s at a fucking poetry reading, while Eddie starts to cry.

“Be brave, be proud, what _horseshit!_ What the fuck are you all afraid of, huh? Some dumb fucking clown. Some dumb fucking painting! Dumb fucking mummy! What the _fuck_. You guys don’t know. You guys don’t fucking _know_ what there is to really be afraid of, you _don’t_. ‘Stand.’ Like, what? What the fuck, stand against _what_ , Stan? What? What?” Eddie can’t speak anymore, even though he wants to, crumpling down to Richie’s eye level. He keeps his feet planted, wrapping his arms around his knees, curling into a ball.

Tentatively, Richie creeps closer to Eddie. He’s not even crying anymore, he’s just hyperventilating. Like he might scream again at any minute. Slowly, Richie puts a hand around Eddie’s wrist.

“Hey, man,” he says quietly. “You can’t…. We don’t know what Stan was going through. We can’t…”

“I know.” Eddie rubs his cheek hard against his knees. He seems calmed by Richie’s touch, somewhat. “I know.” His breathing takes on a different quality, less panic and more just exertion. “It’s not fair. He did this just to have the last word.”

“I know.”

“He _never_ let us get the last word.”

“In his defense, our last words were usually stupid. We never won anyway.” Richie wipes away a tear on Eddie’s face. “Wanna tell me which part of Stan’s weirdly optimistic suicide note struck such a chord with you?”

Eddie shrugs, averting his eyes. “I just— I’m a fucking mess, Richie. My life up to now has been a fucking disaster, and like, I can’t even tell if I’m working to fix it. I still feel like a mess, I’m just. More distracted. And then when I’m not distracted, it all comes back and I remember I’m such a fucking coward and I’m weak and pathetic and so fucking _needy_ and what the fuck do I have to be proud of, Stan? I fucking hate myself!”

“Okay, shhh,” Richie says, because Eddie is starting to yell again. He rubs his arm as soothingly as he can. “You’re not any of those things, c’mon, man. You don’t really believe that shit.”

“I left you to die, Rich.”

“What?” Richie blinks. “When?”

“What? With the — with the fucking — Stan! The Stan-spider thing! It could have ripped your face off right there and I would have just fucking _let it_ and —”

“Okay, first of all? Spider-Stan is a much better name for It. Second of all? Are you still really upset about that? It was fucking chaos down there, man. I told a pomeranian monster to sit. None of us were firing on all cylinders. And then like, right after that, you actually saved my life. I _told you_ , you’re braver than you think you are.”

“Yeah, well, now I know you’re thinking with your dick when it comes to me,” Eddie mumbles with half a shrug. “You’re an even less reliable source than before.”

“Okay, _wow._ ” He knows Eddie is genuinely upset, so Richie tries his hardest to keep from grinning. “Excuse me, my dick is an excellent judge of character. When I first moved to LA, I got a handjob from this dude at a bar that no longer exists in Burbank. That dude? Ten years later, nearly won a season of the _Bachelorette_.”

“God, shut up.” Eddie buries his head in his knees for a second, ears completely pink, before poking one eye out towards Richie. “What season?”

“I can’t believe you like reality TV,” Richie says. “That’s what you should feel bad about yourself for.”

Reluctantly, Eddie starts to smile. It’s not entirely sad. “I want to fix it,” he says. “Myself, I mean. But I’m. I’m so tired, man.”

“Well, if you’re taking life advice from the suicide note of Stanley Uris, who was, lest we forget,” Richie adds, with as much venom as he can muster, under the circumstances, “a _birdwatcher_ , he also said to be who we want to be. _You_ get to decide that. You don’t have to hide who you are anymore.”

“That’s just it, Rich,” Eddie says, sighing. “What if I’m _not_ hiding? What if this is it. What if all I am is this needy fucking Loser who still needs someone to take care of me?”

Richie remembers how nice it felt to have Eddie combing his fingers through his hair, so he does that to Eddie now, despite his hands being dirty from his fall. Eddie doesn’t notice. He just sighs again, softer than before..

“Oh,” says Richie, feeling him relax under his hand and marveling at it. “Well, don’t worry about _that_. It’s time for you to take care of _me_ now. You’ve been coasting for far too long.”

Eddie’s smile is fuller now. “Fuck you, Richie,” he says.

“Well, yeah,” says Richie fast, heart racing. “You’ll do that too.”

They both go quiet, still except for the creek trickling nearby, eyes locked.

Then Eddie says, “Fuck it. I guess we’re doing this, huh?”

Richie blinks. “Wow. _Suuuper_ romantic there, buddy. Careful, I’m about to fucking swoon here.”

“Oh, you with the fucking romance.” Eddie straightens a little, but not enough to shake Richie’s hand from his head. “You were just giving me a pep talk using notes from a suicide letter. Give me a break.”

Richie, feeling brave, and feeling, deep deep down, just a little bit proud, though not of himself, leans in and kisses Eddie. It’s closed and soft, missing the center of his lips just a bit, just enough for Eddie to do his part and turn his head to fix it.

“Jesus,” says Richie, resting his face against Eddie’s. “Okay, break given. I wasn’t kidding about you taking care of me, though.”

“I know,” says Eddie.

“Like, I mean. My idea of skincare is slapping some toothpaste on a zit like it’s 1983. I need help.”

“Jesus Christ,” says Eddie. “I said I know.”

And then Eddie says, “For fuck’s sake, where are your _shoes_?”

“You ran outta there like a pomeranian was after you, what the fuck was I supposed to do?”

Eddie lets out a breath. Richie feels it on his eyelashes. He says, “You ran after me.” It’s not a question.

“Yeah, and my feet are definitely fucking bleeding now. C’mon, Nurse Kaspbrak, let’s see what you still got in your fanny pack.”

Eddie stands, without any indication of pain in his fucking knees from being crouched in that position, and this time, he helps Richie up. They begin the long, painful walk back to the house, where hopefully there’ll be no wild animals that might have wandered in through the back door Eddie probably left open. They don’t say much on their way up. Eddie holds his hand the whole time.

* * *

That seems to be the last of their emotional breakdowns for awhile, although who knows? It hasn’t even been a week. As the day progresses, it’s like they start to breathe a little easier, no longer stepping on eggshells in their own psyches.

Richie, at Eddie’s insistence, soaks his feet in warm water to clean them off. He only sustained some minor scratches, nothing that needs to be bandaged, but Eddie coats them all in antibacterial ointment, smirking the whole time at Richie’s whining.

Then, they go for a walk. Richie is kinda too shy to share the bits he’s been working on, since they’re still pretty rough, but he gives Eddie a vague, half-embarrassed outline of the ideas. Eddie doesn’t laugh, but then they’re not really jokes and he’s at least not laughing _at_ him so that’s something. And he’s grinning a ton when Richie starts unconsciously talking in LA terms that usually make him want to jump in front of traffic, using words like _process_ and _method_ and _bounce the ideas around and see what sticks._

When they make it back to the house, it’s Eddie’s idea to go for a drive, even though they’re looking at the same goddamn trees they just walked through. Richie agrees anyway, and packs them a lunch while Eddie changes out of his little workout outfit.

To Richie’s surprise, Eddie wants to drive. His doctor said it was good to stretch his shoulder once he felt able, and Eddie, it turns out, is a fantastic driver. Forgive Richie for not fucking expecting that when the only thing he knew was that Eddie crashed his fucking car when Mike called him. Eddie no longer seems all that anxious about the hairpin turns and lack of guard rails. He still mutters about how fucking risky and unsafe they are, but his body language is all cool control, steering with one hand even around the sharpest bends.

They wind up in Nederland, which is even smaller than Derry. There’s a huge reservoir at the edge of town where they park to eat lunch, and Eddie is outraged to discover that Richie just packed cheese sandwiches. Like, a slice of cheese between two pieces of white bread. Even though that’s the exact same fucking recipe as a _grilled cheese_ and _no one_ questions whether or not _that’s_ a real sandwich, _Eddie,_ but then that’s like saying a bowl of fucking I don’t know _oatmeal_ is the same amount of appetizing as a bowl of oats soaking in some cold fucking _water, Richie_ , and oh of fucking _course_ you’d bring something as boring as _oatmeal_ into the conversation you _boring_ son of a, and like would it have fucking killed you to throw a slice of turkey in here, Jesus fucking Christ, it’s just sticking to the roof of my mouth, you’re _hopeless_ , and then they both take it to the group chat to see if a cheese sandwich qualifies as a good enough lunch sandwich, no, it’s not grilled or toasted or anything, it’s just lukewarm from being in the fucking car and no, Richie, it’s not like the fucking _French_ do lunch if you use fucking yellow American and Wonderbread, and in the end the group is completely divided, and Richie only wants to speak to Ben and Bill, he has no other friends.

After lunch, they explore Nederland, but there’s literally nothing to see. There’s barely any people. They pass a store that sells crystals, and another that sells maple everything, and a large indoor carousel they completely ignore. They go into an Ace hardware store and buy absolutely nothing. They may have been closeted, but not so deeply as to understand what to do with any type of tool.

But still, it’s exhilarating to be out of the house. There’s always the risk that what’s between them exists only in their tiny bubble of a sprawling mountain mansion. But it’s good to be out in public, even if the public seems to be only about five people in the whole dumb town, and not thinking twice about the way Eddie touches his shoulder and leans into him as he’s poking at the different types of blinds that all look the same to him. Not worrying about who will see them sitting in the bed of the rental pickup, his hand on Eddie’s thigh when he’s leaning over to type his defense of the cheese sandwich in the face of Bev’s derision through Eddie’s phone, not worrying who will see Eddie bite the top of Richie’s earlobe to get him to stop, which could have been sexy if he hadn’t done it so fucking hard. Richie never would have believed he’d get to experience this.

Eddie drives slowly back to the house, windows down, sunlight trickling through the trees like rain on their way up. Apparently if they go high enough into the mountains, there will still be snow on the ground, so maybe Bill hadn’t been too far off about the risk of an avalanche. Never summer, they call it. That sounds like hell to Richie.

Richie fiddles with the radio dial while Eddie drives. He seems ambivalent to music in general, except when Stevie comes on.

“ _I’ve been afraid of chaaaanges ‘cause I built my life around you…”_

“Jesus!” he says, slapping Richie’s hand. “Turn that off, we’re way too fragile for _Landslide_ right now, what are you, crazy?”

Richie finds instead some nameless 90s R&B song that Eddie seems to vibe with. Then he gets a private text from Bev.

_Bev: Taut. Firm. Surprisingly tan. Tested while he slept and i could indeed bounce a quarter off it._

_Bev: update on your end?_

_Bev: Yes pun intended jackass_

“What are you grinning at?” Eddie asks, even though he’s got his eyes on the road.

“Nothing,” he says. “Bev’s just finally living up to her reputation, the minx.”

_Richie: hah, well we’re still just working off touch over here, you hussy. I think I got a quick grab last night and all I can say is there are surprises lurking under those dockers._

His thumb hovers over the send button, his heart hammering, but then Eddie goes over a dip in the road which gently jolts the whole car, causing his thumb to tap down. Oh well. He guesses he’s officially out now, and if Eddie gets annoyed about it later, it’s his fault for not driving smoother.

_Bev: Roger that. Awaiting further results._

_Bev: And calling me hussie is a little rich, considering you were fully making out ten feet from a giant evil spider clown_

“Bill has a b-b-b-big mouth,” he mutters, face hot, and sends back to Bev, _Everything I do is a little Rich, baby_

He looks up and realizes they’re sitting in the driveway. Eddie’s watching him, half a smile on his face. The sun cuts just across his mouth, one of his eyes hidden in the shadow of the car. Kicked up mountain dust floats behind him, the smell of evergreen filtering through the window. Jesus, it’s enough to make a man realize he’s in love. So Richie does.

“What?” he asks, mouth dry.

“You peck at your phone with your index finger like a fucking chicken,” Eddie says, still smiling. “And for the love of God, who keeps the keyboard sounds on?”

For some reason, Richie feels an incredible urge to defend himself, but nothing specific comes to mind. There’s all these parts to himself that he’s never even contemplated, never even noticed. That if anyone else has, they’ve never shared them with him. But Eddie is seeing them, and Richie, who has never actually taken constructive criticism very well, wants to know his thoughts on everything. Eddie, what does it look like when I chew my food? Do I hog the covers when I sleep? Is it weird that I put my shirt on last, even after my socks and shoes, before I leave the house? What about that I still lift my feet up when I drive over railroad tracks, even though I’m forty-one fucking years old? Do you see me still look at my wrist to check the time even though I haven’t worn a watch for seventeen years, after my mother died and I took off the one she gave me when I was a kid to make sure I was home for curfew, because she knew there was something bad out there, even if she never understood the shape of it, but she still let me go out because she was a good mom and knew I had friends to watch my back, and a good watch to make sure I was home on time? Am I drinking enough water? What do you think of my aftershave?

He wants Eddie to see all of it. He wants Eddie looking at him. He’s always wanted that, and it used to be, the only way he knew how to get him to was to rile him up and piss him off. It’s a pretty simple fucking method, but it turns out there’s one simpler.

He leans over the console and kisses him. They’re still belted into their seats, and Richie grabs Eddie’s, almost pinning him back. Eddie makes a soft noise against him, opening his mouth just enough for Richie to pull his lower lip between his teeth. Eddie’s hand twines into his hair, tight in a way that gives Richie _ideas_ , but then Eddie’s nails scratch into his scalp and Richie just shivers away all thought.

But. They’re not fucking teenagers here. They’re not going to fool around in a car feet away from several thousand dollar mattresses. No matter how tempting that sounds. His back would never forgive him.

So Richie pulls back, just enough so Eddie doesn’t look cross-eyed at him. His fingers are still in Richie’s hair. He looks perfectly dazed.

Richie reaches up. “Peck,” he says, poking Eddie’s nose with his index finger. “Peck, peck, peck.” He can do a _better_ chicken impression, just for the record, but that’d be a complete mood-killer.

Eddie smacks his hand away, still flushed. “C’mon, we’re gonna fucking roast in here, you stupid chicken.” He unbuckles his seatbelt and slides out of the car.

“Who you callin’ chicken?” Richie hollers, climbing out after him. He tries his best Marty McFly. “Hey! _Nobody calls me chicken!_ ”

Eddie flips him off and lets himself into the house. Whatever. He knows Eddie probably has a Michael J. Fox thing buried deep, he’ll pull it out eventually.

He’s only just stepped foot into the house when Mike sends a text to Eddie, although he puts it in the group chat, saying he’s planning to stop in New York City on his way out West, and if Eddie had any must-see spots. It’s kind of cute that Mike doesn’t realize that all of them have spent plenty of time in the city because of work, and pretty soon they’re all on a six-person Skype call arguing over whether Prince Street Pizza is better than Joe’s, what landmarks aren’t actually a hellscape trying to see, of which the only unanimous call is to avoid Times Square, and if you’ve only got time for one museum absolutely do not make it the Natural History Museum, because it’s just a bunch of stuffed animals and racist dioramas and boring science and math shit.

“Oh, _excuse me_ , Ben!” says Eddie, who got on the call with his own phone because he didn’t want to share the screen with Richie anymore, and who is actually standing on the couch in frustration, “I didn’t realize you found math _boring!_ Remind me never to set foot in your fucking buildings that apparently you built without _math!_ What kind of three little pigs _bullshit_ —”

“That museum is a fucking joke, Eddie,” Ben says, looking like he wants to get up too but physically can’t. “The only thing to appreciate is the building itself and that’s it!”

“The big blue whale!” Eddie yells directly into the receiver, like he’s in _Jerry McGuire,_ forgetting that he’s on a video call and giving everyone a good shot of the ceiling and up his nose. “You’re just gonna fucking sit there and ignore the big fucking _whale_?”

Richie sits back, content to watch Eddie pace on the couch cushions. His only input had been which Broadway shows to avoid (most of them) and some bars that, upon further Googling, haven’t been open in at least a decade. But he’s almost tempted to fly them out to meet Mike in New York. To get them all to go out. He wants to go see everything with them, explore all their own corners of the world and see some new ones too, like one big weird ass family. No, not even just that. He’d be fine going one-on-one. Hang out with Ben in the Grand Canyon and have him explain the architecture of the Earth and how the rivers and reservoirs were formed. Take Mike on a tour of DC and make him use his librarian brain to point out how every founding father was a fucking piece of shit until they get kicked out of every monument. Go to Portland with Bev and just get high in their hotel room and do absolutely fucking nothing productive. Bring Bill to Las Vegas! Why the fuck not. He has no idea if he’s into gambling or whatever, but they could go see a show. Take Bill to see Cher, that’d be worth the price of admission.

And Eddie. God. He wants to take Eddie everywhere. He wants to take Eddie _home_. Richie can’t stand LA all that much, but he might like it better with Eddie there, who’d fucking love it. Everyone is into things like _clean eating_ and _supplements_ and _wearable technology_ , and road rage is considered the status quo. He’d fit right in.

Listening to them argue, Richie can’t help but think that they’ve all been living with this chronic illness for twenty-seven years, undiagnosed and untreated. They’d had no idea what was rotting at them on the inside, no clue what was causing it, but all the same, feeling the effects wearing them down to the bone. And now, they _knew_. They had a _diagnosis._ Pennywise the FuckYounoma. And yeah, just knowing the name for their trauma, a name for their disease, isn’t enough to cure it. But knowing the name means they can treat it. It means they can finally understand themselves, and find ways to start healing.

They all finally have to get off the phone once they realize Mike has been sitting in a rest stop parking lot for over an hour taking what can’t be very helpful notes. Bill makes them promise to do this again soon before they all go, the fucking sap.

Eddie climbs down off the couch. “Imagine thinking you can get better dim sum in _Chelsea_ ,” he bitches. “It’s probably not even mafia-run.”

Richie truly has no idea if that’s a plus or minus, so he just shrugs. He finds dim sum intimidating. Too many little pots hiding things.

Eddie puts his hands on his hips, looking at where Richie is slumped comfortably on the floor. “I’m going to shower,” he announces, even though he’s definitely already done that today. “And then I’m going to clean the kitchen, and find something healthy to cook for dinner. And in that amount of time, you’re going to have found for us a _good_ movie to watch downstairs and we won’t debate it for hours until we wind up watching more _Shark Tank_ , you’re going to _decide_ and it’s going to be something I’ll also _like_ and enjoy and not just dumb bullshit _you_ like that you know I’ll hate and that’s what’s going to happen. Okay?”

Richie almost wants to clean the kitchen instead. He suddenly can’t remember a single movie that’s ever been made. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He turns around, and then turns back. “Do you… need anything?”

“Um,” Richie says. He wants to ask for a kiss, make it cute and dumb. He’s about to ask for it. And then another Derry memory comes rocketing back — Eddie’s mother in the shadows of the TV room, the air reeking of roses and medicine, beckoning Eddie closer when he’s so close to freedom. “Nah. I’m good.”

“Alright,” says Eddie. He doesn’t have to, but he walks by Richie. He runs a hand through his hair again, and leans down to kiss his forehead. “If it helps, I haven’t seen a new movie since 2012.”

“What. How. How is that… What was the _movie_?”

Eddie looks at the clock by the stove. “You have four hours. Do you really have time for guessing games?”

“ _Shit._ ”

Eddie disappears. He’s not enigmatic by nature. Everything about him is typically written on his face, and anything that isn’t doesn’t take long to come out of his mouth. There’s no way his wife didn’t know he was gay, for example. But still, Richie watches him walk up the staircase to go shower and thinks, _One movie since 2012?? Who_ are _you?_

He spends almost an hour sorting through Netflix alone. He even gets out a pad and starts making notes. Nothing cements itself as the movie that he _needs_ to make Eddie see. He goes back to the main menu on the television to try another service, but stops when he hears shouting coming from upstairs.

Richie has leapt over the couch and is already up the first two steps when he stops and actually pays attention to what he’s hearing. The usual inflections and pauses of a person on the phone. The words, “ _No_ , Larry, I won’t reconsider. I _can’t_ reconsider,” and “She had to see this coming! She had to!” and “Well I’m sorry but that’s not my responsibility,” come slumping down the stairs like a slinky every child of divorce knows how to play with.

Richie shuffles back over to the couch, feeling guilty for eavesdropping even though Eddie is raising his voice loud enough for the bears outside to hear. He grabs his laptop on the way, plugged in and overheating on the table.

He wants to research movies, but feels he should take a turn out of Eddie’s playbook and actually poke his head back into reality. He opens his email.

Okay. It’s only a few hundred unread emails. Hate mail from venue owners in Reno asking him who the hell he thinks he is. A few friends who have heard he’s gone AWOL wondering if he’s okay. A few strangers who missed the memo that he lost his mind on stage, seeking to collaborate on projects, none of them interesting. Steve, his tour manager, agent, and contractually-obligated friend, sending him _CALL ME ASAP_ emails every hour for the first two weeks he was gone, and then nothing except for forwarded emails from rehab facilities offering coupon codes. As if Richie would go to a _discount rehab_. He may have hit professional rock bottom, but he still has standards. And money.

He opens the last sad email from Steve, contemplating the blinking cursor for too long, and then sends back a wave emoji. Suddenly, with sharp, rocking clarity, Richie realizes he has no idea what day of the week it is. Like, zero concept. He tries to mentally backtrack, to remember if he ever heard any nurse say something like, _Happy Humpday!_ or _TGIF_ or some other horseshit, but there’s nothing. Eventually, with great shame, he Googles it. Okay. It’s a Sunday. Steve probably won’t check his email today, so he has to wait until tomorrow for his indignation.

Eddie comes back down eventually, taking much longer than even he’d need to for a shower. He’s still flushed like he’s been standing under hot water, but his hair is bone dry.

“Sorry,” he grumbles, heading quickly into the kitchen. “Fuckin’ lawyers, man.”

“Fuckin A,” Richie agrees, and quietly scratches out _The Judge, Lincoln Lawyer,_ and _RBG_ off his movie list.

It’s dark out by the time Eddie tackles dinner. The room smells of oranges from whatever he used to clean. It makes Richie’s stomach growl, privately ready to admit that maybe the cheese sandwiches hadn’t been substantial enough.

He dives deep into the internet, desperately seeking some entertainment that won’t swear Eddie off all movies for the next decade. Although, it’d be kind of hilarious to bring Eddie to some of the parties he has to go to in LA, and watch him be unable to hold a single conversation, unless it was about _Keeping Up With the Kardashians._

“Oh my god,” he says, almost another hour later, after Eddie hands him a bowl of food with his eyes averted.

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, sitting on the far end of the couch. He sits with his legs crossed like a little kid, socked feet on the cushions, glaring into space.

“Eddie.”

“Fuck _off_ , I said.”

“Eddie.”

“I’ll take it back.”

“Eddie,” says Richie. “You made _spaghetti._ ” He draws it out like a heart-warmed parent with some freshly drawn refrigerator art.

“It’s _actually_ angel hair, _dickwad_.” Eddie shoves a whole forkful into his mouth, and keeps talking. “With _actual_ cherry tomatoes and spinach and no fucking sauce, okay, it’s just _pasta_. _Nice_ pasta, with olive oil. Eat your fucking food.”

Richie eats. He waits until Eddie has another mouthful before whispering, exactly how a ghost might, “ _Eddie spaghetti.”_

“Okay,” says Eddie, putting his bowl down on the coffee table and lunging for Richie’s.

“No! It’s mine!” Richie leaps off the couch with nimbleness that even surprises him and starts shoveling pasta into his mouth so fast, he can’t even taste it.

“You’re going to choke and _die_ ,” Eddie says, settling back down calmly with his own bowl. “And I will just drive away laughing. I’ll leave the doors open so the bears can feed.”

“You will not,” Richie says. “You think laughing while driving is a distraction.”

Eddie, smiles, unwillingly and out of his control. It’s brief, but Richie caught it. Between the eye roll and running a hand through his messy, unstyled hair, looking for a change of topic — Richie caught it. And he realizes, _oh, I’m not the only one in this. He’s right in this with me._

And then he thinks, _hah. Sucker._

Richie spends twenty full minutes arguing in favor of leaving the dishes in the sink, and then another ten arguing that washing them _before_ putting them in the dishwasher makes no goddamn sense, and then Eddie pulls the classic mom _if you had stopped arguing with me when I first asked it would have been done by now_ to which Richie replies with the disgusting teenage boy _fine I’ll do it but just know I probably won’t do a good job and they’ll still be dirty_ _anyway_ and then Richie just leaves to go set up the movie theater downstairs while Eddie cleans up, which is really what they both wanted anyway.

He’s worked in a couple theaters, before everything was digital. Now a chimpanzee could run a projector. Well, it’s not like he’d been exercising a ton of brain cells while doing it his senior year of high school, all throughout the couple years of college he managed, and those first few years in LA, but still. Now a chimpanzee could run one _accidentally_.

Although this is like a fancy fucking thing that takes him twenty minutes to realize he has to run through his laptop, but _whatever_. Eddie needs alone time scrubbing his two fucking bowls.

The theater is one of those little home movie screening room that sits about ten people, with seats coupled together that lean back and extend, perfect for making any third wheel in attendance depressed and moody. He’s glad Eddie is taking his time. It means he can stretch out in one chair and he doesn’t have to consciously decide to sit directly next to Eddie with nothing in between them, or sit next to Eddie with two arm rests between them. Let Mr. Fucking Clean who is _in this_ _with him_ decide where to sit.

It’s not a big deal. Eddie doesn’t even blink when he stretches out directly next to Richie, their arms brushing. He just looks at the screen. “ _Interstellar?_ ”

Richie needs to stop making everything a big deal. He’s going to give himself an ulcer. “Uh. Yeah. I haven’t seen it, so I figured it was safe from you accusing me of picking something you hate. It’s the guy who did _Inception_ , which was good, and it’s space. We like space.”

They’d been Losers. Of course they liked science fiction. Richie had his dad’s Blockbuster card and ultimate freedom apart from the R rated movies, and even that had stopped being an obstacle once he had someone cause a diversion so he could switch some VHSs around. So they saw whatever they wanted, and they almost always ended up in the science fiction section. _Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Flash Gordon, The Last Starfighter, Blade Runner,_ anything John Carpenter made, _Tron, Akira,_ even _E._ fucking _T._ Even now, Richie can’t imagine what other boys talked about if they weren’t into that stuff, and with as much as they were made fun of, it’s clear Richie and his friends were the outliers. Sports? Girls? He can’t imagine talking about girls or basketball for as long as he and Stan argued about the possibility of going into a video game and being a lightcycle racer like in _Tron_ and okay, if, just _if_ , it were possible, what video game would you want to go into? _Don’t_ say _Street Fighter_ because that’s my thing and you’d get your ass kicked within five seconds, it’d be a total waste, you’d probably want to be in like _Duck Hunt_ or some shit, hold on, is duck even _kosher?_ Whatever you could just look at the birds you fucking dingus.

So, yeah. They’d all loved science fiction back then, and Richie still loves it, and so, despite his strange taste in television shows, Eddie might still like it too.

So they watch _Interstellar_. It’s, uh. Certainly _space_. Definitely science is present.

“Dude,” Eddie says, after sitting silently beside him for thirty whole minutes. “Do _you_ understand what the fuck is going on?”

“No!” Richie bursts out frantically. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I’m so fucking confused.”

“What are they _talking_ about. What is going on. Where are the aliens?”

“ _Yes_ ,” says Eddie vehemently. “Where are the fucking aliens. I’m so _fucking_ confused.”

Matthew McConaughey looks good, at least, if just as confused as Richie feels. Richie was once at the same afterparty as McCon a couple years ago and he’d been over by the bar when Richie went to get a drink and McCon had seen him approach and said, _Hey man, you want somethin’?_ and Richie had said, _uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh_ and McCon had gestured with two fingers and then handed Richie a glass of straight whiskey which is not what he would have ordered at the time, and then McCon walked away and so it’s like _Matthew McConaughey_ _bought Richie a drink_ even though it was an open bar, but now it’s Richie’s drink of choice and it’s also the sexiest celebrity story he has.

Thinking about McCon and thinking about telling Eddie about that story even though he probably wouldn’t be very impressed, makes him think that this movie might be better if they were stoned, and oh Jesus, he’s such a fucking idiot, this is a legal state. And he’s about to turn to Eddie to tell him they should find a dispensary tomorrow, but Eddie has a better idea by rolling on top of him and kissing him fully on the mouth.

The thing about kissing is — Richie’s never done it slow. It’s always fast and that’s always Richie’s doing. If it was with a girl, he’d just wanted it over with as soon as possible. It it was with a boy, it was furtive and rushed, hurried so he can get what he wanted and then forget it ever happened.

Eddie sets the pace this time, and he keeps it slow. He braces one hand on Richie’s neck, careful not to put his full weight on top of Richie as he deepens the kiss. But Richie finds he desperately wants it and pulls him closer until Eddie is spread fully against him, holding him down. With his hand fisted in Eddie’s hair, not giving him space to move away, and Eddie’s hand so near his throat with all his weight, Richie can barely breathe. But with that last breath, he’d want to be doing just this anyway.

He used to see kids doing this in the theaters where he worked. Even some adults, too. His coworkers used to make fun of them, but Richie had just felt a loneliness so deep inside him it had been untouchable. He never thought he’d get to kiss someone in a movie like this, and even though it’s not exactly the same, since they’re in a house, the kiss is exactly what he wants it to be.

Eddie bites Richie’s lower lip and slides his thigh between his leg. It’s overwhelming, but that in itself is like a light switch for both of them. Suddenly a spotlight, no, those fucking blinding LED headlights no one fucking needs are shining on a big billboard directly between them that says, _You’re 41 Years Old, You’ve Been In Love With Him Since You Were Kids, And You’ve Never Had Satisfying Sex In Your Life_.

They pull back for a second. They’re illuminated by the warm tones of a movie that spends a lot of time on a farm for something about space. Eddie’s eyes are shadowed, he’s straddling Richie’s lap, and he’s still got a hand at the base of Richie’s throat. It’s almost the same position they’d been in when they got stabbed.

Eddie seems to come to some decision by himself, because he sits up fully in Richie’s lap and strips off his shirt. He’s slow, because his shoulder is still bandaged, and it has the unwitting appeal of feeling like a lapdance. He tosses it onto the chair and then drags Richie’s off too, knocking his glasses askew like a nerd in a raunchy 80s sexy comedy. Richie is a hundred percent happy to let Eddie decide what he wants, especially if it means getting to look at the lines of his stomach, the smooth planes of his chest, the way his collarbone pokes out just like his wrist bones, that look to Richie like the opposite of fragile.

He doesn’t usually pay too close attention to his own body. It’s the privilege of being a white man in Hollywood, one he takes full advantage of. He’s never felt any real love for it, though. His mouth was never fast enough, and neither were his feet. It’s awkward and tall and turning on him every day. He’s never found much use for it, honestly.

But maybe his body is designed just to be looked at by Eddie, to have his hands gently feel the breadth of his shoulders, down to his ribcage, over his belly, with a look of unmasked wonder on his face.

Richie’d just been holding Eddie’s knees like a pair of handlebars, but now he touches Eddie’s bandage and the place where it meets his bare skin. He asks, “How are you going to tell people you got this?”

Eddie blinks. “On safari,” he says. “I was taking a picture of a giraffe when I got gored by a rhino.”

“Badass,” says Richie.

Eddie’s fingers trickle over Richie’s scar, uncovered and still healing, still gnarled and pink. His touch is so light, it’s more like he’s moving the air around Richie’s skin, but still every nerve ending Richie has feels it. Eddie says, “What about you?”

“Cut myself shaving,” Richie says.

“Dumbass,” says Eddie, and then he leans down to kiss it.

Richie has no control over the sound he makes, the way he bucks up into Eddie’s mouth, the way his hand clutches the back of Eddie’s head. He’s panting like he’s running a marathon, or like he’s harder than he’s ever been in his life, which is the actual truth. He’s saying stupid things like “Oh holy _fuck_ ” and “Jesus Eddie oh _oh_ fuck _please_ ” because Eddie’s mouth has moved away from the scar and over to a nipple and up to his neck like Richie’s a dirty kitchen and he doesn’t know where to start.

He nuzzles behind Richie’s ear, finally tugging on his ear lobe in a way that’s _sexy_ , and says, “You gotta tell me what you want here, Rich. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Fuck,” Richie moans, like he’s not _literally_ grinding up against Eddie’s hips, his hand tight on his ass like he’s conducting thorough research for Beverly Marsh and her study on the gluteous maximus Loserium. “You seem like you’ve got the hang of it from here, buddy.”

“No.” Eddie sits up so Richie can see that he’s serious, even though his hips are still jerking in time with Richie’s. “I’m…. I’m supposed to take care of you. Right? But you. You have to tell me how.”

It would have been colder if Eddie had set Richie on actual _fire_. He feels red and alive in every inch of his body, so hot and so _seen_ all of a sudden that he has to fight the instinct to hide his face. Instead he grabs Eddie by the neck and brings him down to kiss again.

The thing is — sure, Richie can _talk_. Yeah, he can always _talk_. Can he always say something? No. But he can talk.

So asking him to talk is a no brainer. But asking him to talk about what he _wants,_ what he needs, to actually say something _important_ — that’s asking for a lot. Maybe more than Richie is capable of, at the present moment, for obvious reasons. How is he supposed to sit here with Eddie ready and aching in his lap and say, _I want you to make sure it’s good for me too. I want you to check if I’m comfortable. I want you to clean me up afterwards. I want you to hold me. I want you to not leave. Please, God, I want you to stay._

But that’s probably not exactly what Eddie’s asking for, and while Richie’s pretty sure he can say those things to Eddie without getting scorned for it, he’d rather not ruin the mood by crying. Anyway, he _does_ want everything Eddie is asking for. And those things are slightly easier to ask for, because coherence isn’t exactly necessary.

“I want, _fuck_ ,” he says against Eddie’s mouth. He can feel Eddie’s brow furrowed against him, like he’s concentrating on everything Richie is saying and doing. “Please Eddie, I want… Can I….”

“What,” says Eddie, and also, “Yes, yeah, _fuck._ ”

Richie is a contrary fucker, and as soon as Eddie asked him to say something, the one thing Richie wants to do is keep his mouth full. He gently pushes Eddie over, off of him and onto his own chair again. And while Eddie’s mind is still catching up with the change in location, Richie slithers down the seat. The legs on the chairs are extended, and they creak dangerously, not intended for someone to put all their weight down on the end. He braces himself with one foot on the floor and gets to work unbuttoning Eddie’s pants.

“Holy fucking shit,” Eddie says breathlessly, gazing down at him with wide eyes.

The view from down there is literally enough to take Richie’s breath away. “The glasses are really doing it for you, right?” Richie says, smiling. He can form complete sentences now that Eddie’s mouth isn’t directly on him. He traces his fingertips up and down the hard length trapped beneath Eddie’s slacks, making Eddie jerk towards him.

“Fuck,” says Eddie. “ _Yes._ ”

Richie has done this a few times, and it’s always his favorite thing. Yes, okay, he has an oral fixation, of course he does, har har, _hilarious_. But it’s the only act that makes all his background nerves disappear. Everything else fades, his anxieties, his loneliness, and he can close his eyes and think only of the weight on his tongue and the spit in his mouth.

Taking Eddie out of his underwear and sucking the tip between his lips is what he imagines it felt like to crush Pennywise’s heart. It’s _relief,_ pure and simple. It’s like the tension in his whole body has been cut clean through like the strings of a marionette, and he breathes easy, through his nose, as he swallows Eddie down. The skin is hot and velvety beneath his hand, and he uses his other one to tug Eddie’s pants down his thighs, so he can hold him right in place. Richie can’t see it clearly, but he can see a faint tan line at his waist and paleness across his angular hips and he can feel a smooth, round, perfectly muscular ass tensing under his nails. Distantly, he makes a note of it for Bev.

“Oh holy fucking shit, Rich,” Eddie gasps, clutching hard at Richie’s head. “Holy fucking shit. Holy fucking shit.”

Richie moans around him in agreement. Normally, he keeps his eyes closed. Normally, he does this just for his own benefit. But this isn’t normal. So he gazes up at Eddie. He looks completely fucked, his lips red and shining, his cheeks pink from Richie’s stubble and Richie’s mouth, hanging onto Richie’s head like he might fly away at any second.

Richie’s never been this hard in his entire life, but he doesn’t touch himself yet, even though he’s still in fucking jeans. His ability to take his hands off Eddie is akin to his ability to take his hands off his own body. You’d need an axe to separate them. So he just rubs himself against Eddie’s calf like a fucking animal, but it doesn’t _matter_. This whole thing is sloppy and ridiculous and there’s a fucking Hans Zimmer score swelling in the background. He’s pretty sure he’d been dreaming of this moment up until the moment he forgot Eddie existed, and it’s pretty damn perfect so far.

Then Eddie jerks his hips up into Richie’s mouth. Okay, now it’s perfect.

“Fuck fuck _fuck,_ ” Eddie groans when Richie digs his fingers into his ass. Okay, now it’s perfect.

“ _Richie_ ,” Eddie says, lost and looking Richie right in the eyes. Okay. _Now_ it’s perfect.

Eddie smells clean from his shower, but not so much as to totally cover the scent of him. God, Richie can’t wait to taste him, but then Eddie’s tugging Richie off, pulling him up towards him again, and Richie wants what Eddie wants, so he goes.

“God — you — take your fucking pants off, jackass, fuck, Richie.” Eddie stops trying to help when Richie takes over undoing the zipper and just touches him everywhere, scratching faintly over his neck, his chest, finally grabbing his bare ass once Richie finally gets his jeans down and pulls him closer.

“Great,” Richie stutters, even though he’s momentarily blinded by the sensation of Eddie against his bare skin, at the wet length of Eddie’s dick dragging against his own. “Thought I was gonna come in fucking pants like a fucking kid. Now I can — can come just outside them like a, _fuck_ , like a fucking man.”

“ _God,_ ” says Eddie, gripping his neck. “I’m gonna stick my dick back in your mouth if you don’t shut the fuck up.” But then he negates his point by kissing him openly, lovingly, not even the slightest bit concerned about where Richie’s mouth had just been.

It would be so much easier if they took a second to actually remove their socks and pants all the way, so they could move without being trapped by their stupid clothing. But who has that kind of _time_ , not when they’re rutting together like graceless teenagers, finally finding the perfect way to shut each other the fuck up.

And then it hits Richie, right as Eddie comes way too early for a man his age, but Richie is in no position to judge because he follows almost immediately after — it hits Richie that _he_ has the time. He has it. He has this. He has Eddie. He clutches the back of Eddie’s head while they shudder together, Eddie keeps the soft moans into Richie’s mouth like smoke through the cracks in a door.

The breathe together like a singular animal.

“Eddie,” he says, without thinking, without intention, just needing to feel the word. His stupid glasses are still on, digging painfully into his cheek where he’s stuck against Eddie’s face. “ _Eddie.”_

And he doesn’t know what he’s saying, but for some reason, Eddie is nodding. “Fuck,” he says, still panting. “I wish I had my goddamn inhaler.”

“It was just — air and water,” Richie says, “C’mere, I got both.”

Eddie laughs, knocking his face away. Then he sees Richie’s face and laughs even more. “Your glasses are all fogged up,” he says. “You look like the backseat of _Titanic_.”

“That ship had a backseat?” Richie slowly pushes himself up, but he has nothing to clean them with, so he just tosses them onto his seat and lies back down, half sprawled on Eddie. He takes no qualms in nuzzling back into Eddie’s neck.

“So,” he says.

“So,” says Eddie. On the big movie screen, people are actually in space suits now.

“Do you think Ben and Bev were more or less dignified than we just were?” Richie asks.

Eddie seems to think about it. “I’m sure they both got their fucking pants all the way off,” he says eventually. “But I bet Ben cried.”

“Ben _absolutely_ cried.” Like Richie hasn’t been close this entire time.

“They must be kinda limited though, since his leg is all fucked up.”

“You haven’t seen Bev’s texts. She is nothing if not determined.”

At some point, Eddie finds the remote and turns the movie off a lot quicker than it took for Richie to turn it on. They’re still mostly undressed, cooling together in the night. It doesn’t take long for them to get physically uncomfortable. Emotionally, though, Richie feels like the pleasant hum that follows a recently rung bell. Smooth and quiet, vibrating with the thrill of having made music.

They lie there awhile until Eddie nudges him aside and shakily gets to his feet, quietly groaning. He pulls his pants back up but doesn’t button them. If Richie suspected Eddie knew how to be even slightly sexy, he would accuse him of putting on a show to look cool. But even the way he grimaces at his stomach is sexy to Richie. God. Everything might be sexy to Richie. Why do people fall in love. It’s so humiliating.

Eddie leaves the room without a word, still grimacing.

“We don’t have to do our walks of shame separately!” Richie calls out to him. “It’s one house, we can do it together!”

But then Eddie’s back, wiping himself down with a wet hand towel. Then he sits down next to where Richie is still sprawled across two chairs.

“You’re such an idiot,” is all he says, and gently starts to clean Richie up with a fresh towel. “ _And_ you’re gross, shift up.”

And _that’s_ when Richie starts crying.

* * *

_“..._

_…_

_…_

_…_

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* * *

There’s a saying about Colorado: _300 Days of Sunshine._ Like, it’s always fucking sunny.

Today is not one of those days.

Richie’s up early again. Last night, he slept even better than the night before. This time, fully unclothed, Eddie wrapped around him like a backpack, drooling right into his ear. It was disgusting and unsanitary and fortunately, Richie is not Eddie, so he was able to enjoy every minute of it.

It’s cooler outside today than it’s been, the sky gray and close, rain flittering through the trees, and everything seems greener and more alive than before. Richie’s wearing his new flannel shirt, drinking a coffee on the back patio, his shitty laptop open but still asleep in front of him. He’s watching the rain.

He’s never been one of those _creative in the morning_ assholes. One of those jerks who can spring right out of bed and have actual thought processes that work immediately. It usually takes him hours and hours before he stops procrastinating and starts working on whatever project he’s on, and that only happens fifty percent of the time he sets out to do it. Maybe 60-40. And certainly, it hasn’t happened on the backside of this decade.

But suddenly, he wants to create. He wakes up in the morning, and even though he’s being spooned by probably the love of his life, a-k-a the only good fucking reason to procrastinate outside of death or illness, he’d found himself easing out of Eddie’s arms at first light. He did lie there for a little bit though, listening to the rain on the roof, enjoying the warmth of the bed. But then he’d gotten up to get to work.

And getting up hadn’t been awful, because he knows that, later tonight, he’ll be right back there. It’s not going anywhere. Eddie’s not going anywhere. Richie might not know exactly where they’ll be heading after their time in this house is up, but he’s fucking flexible about it. Sure, he’s got a lease in LA, and a valuable network he has somehow crafted over the years. But. It’s not a priority.

He taps his space bar to wake his computer up, ready to start writing, when his phone rings.

LA is an hour behind them here, but Richie isn’t surprised that Steve’s calling this early. Steve isn’t addicted to coke anymore, but he’s addicted to girlfriends who are, and he likes to keep their hours. He only sleeps every other day or so.

Richie takes a deep breath. This isn’t the kind of work he wanted to do, but he’s got to deal with it eventually. He’s already got a story in place for where he’s been, minusing the fucking clown, and he’s just planning to put his foot down about needing more time to get back to his career, and about taking the time to reevaluate what his career is, now that he’s jumping firmly out of the closet. If Steve wants to sever ties with him, that. Well, that sucks. But it’s necessary. He just has to be calm and cool about the whole thing.

“Hello?” he says into the receiver. Cool. Calm.

“So you’re gay,” says Steve. “And you murdered a man.”

Richie hangs up.

Steve calls back a minute later. “Well I’m glad to see you haven’t matured from this experience,” Steve says dryly. Bass-heavy house music thumps in the background.

“What the fuck?” Richie asks, voice strangled. He actually looks under the table, looking for a mic. “Are you — are you _spying_ on me?”

There’s a pause on the other end. “So — you’re saying none of that’s a _joke?_ Jesus Christ, Richie, I could have sworn you were joking. What the fuck?”

Richie swallows. “Uh. Well... which explanation do you want first?”

“ _Jesus_.” An even longer pause. “The murder, I guess.”

“Okay,” says Richie. “Well, it was self-defense. No one’s pressing charges. It was back in Maine and I’m in Colorado right now —”

“Yeah, I know, obviously,” says Steve cryptically. Richie gets up and starts checking the patio for cameras. “And the gay thing —-?”

“Well, that’s sort of been a forever kind of thing, dude,” Richie says. And then, not totally sure why, he adds, “Sorry.”

“Oh, dude, I knew. We all knew.”

“What? Who the fuck is we—”

“I just never thought you’d actually have the balls to _do_ anything about it. I’m guessing the murder came _before_ you got yourself a new boyfriend? That’s a hell of a motivational technique you got there, bub.”

“I— _Listen_ ,” Richie interrupts, feeling very off-kilter and trying to right himself again. “I… I still need some time before I get back to work, but I’ve been. Y’know. Writing again. My own stuff, which. Well. Includes the gay stuff. I’m trying to figure out if I can work the killing thing in there, but it’s tough, y’know, to land something like that and —”

“Oh, so you mean all that was scripted?”

Richie stops checking under the bannisters of the patio railing. “Scripted? What?”

“The podcast,” says Steve.

Suddenly, the rain seems a lot louder, pounding heavily like nails in a coffin.

“Podcast,” Richie repeats.

“I was gonna say — it’s funny stuff, Rich. It needs to be tightened up a hell of a lot, and there’s a bit too many in-jokes for the public, like what the fuck is that clown you guys keep talking about? But I think it’s got potential. Who’s that guy you’re talking with? Your boyfriend? He’s a riot.”

“Riot,” Richie says stupidly.

“You’d also need to record some of your own solo stuff too, though. I mean, no offense, his one-on-one stuff was good, but you’re the actual name here, y’know?”

“No. Solo. What?” He’s just saying words now. His bare feet are freezing on the wooden deck. Suddenly, he wishes, for the first time in his life, that he was wearing shoes. He’s overcome with the urge to _run away_. Eddie went down there and spoke into the microphones _alone? What?_ “How the — Steve, what the _fuck_ are you talking about?”

“Your — the podcast, Rich. What are _you_ talking about?”

“We were just fucking around down there!” Richie shouts. A few birds take off in the trees. “How the _fuck_ did you get any of that? That wasn’t for anyone to actually fucking hear, Steve! Jesus, wasn’t it _obvious?_ ”

“I don’t know, you have a weird sense of humor.” The music finally disappears on the other end of the phone. Steve sounds confused but defensive. “How the fuck should I know? You were talking about podcasting before you fucking vanished, man.”

“Because I’m a white guy in LA, of _course_ I was talking about podcasting! Jesus fucking Christ, I’m going to get murdered. How the fuck did you get it? Who’s heard it?”

“That studio is idiot-proof. It’s so whoever is using it, who might be too, uhh, useless to remember to turn in their work, would be able to send something in. Most of the time it’s usually less coherent than you two, so it’s not like, _broadcast_ anywhere. It just gets sent to Big T’s studio. They knew you were one of my clients, so they just sent it along.”

Richie’s heart stops racing so much. He’s still going to get murdered, and it’ll still be painful, but maybe it’ll be quick now. “I’m so fucked. You gotta delete that stuff, man.”

“You sure? Some of it is really funny. You really do that shit with your shoes?”

“Just _fucking delete it, man_. I’m so fucking dead, oh my fucking god.”

And then Steve says, innocently but no less evilly, “You don’t want to hear the solo stuff first?”

Eddie, down in the basement, probably late at night while Richie was passed out, speaking into a microphone about — _God_ knows what, but. Maybe Richie? Fuck. Why would he do that? What did he have to say? That he can’t say to Richie himself?

But then he remembers the way Eddie dragged the wet towel across Richie’s stomach, murmuring a soft apology when the cold water made Richie flinch, and was as gentle as he was when he’d helped dry Richie’s face after crying. That’s all he needs to hear from Eddie.

“Delete it all, Jesus. I’m so fucking dead. You know where to find my body, right? He’s definitely the type to just leave it and book it out of here, so you shouldn’t have any trouble. Don’t convict him, I deserve it. Just give me a quiet funeral.”

But Steve, the absolute fucking asshole that is, just laughs. “Whatever, man,” he says. “I heard the tapes.”

Optimism in an agent is usually a good thing. Richie hangs up on him and just barely resists the urge to throw his phone into the woods.

“Hey.” And then there’s Eddie, standing in the open backdoor, soft and bleary-eyed and ruffled, wearing Richie’s fucking t-shirt. “You okay?”

“Heyyyyyyy,” Richie says, drawing it out until Eddie is immediately wide-awake and instantly suspicious.

“What’s wrong?” he demands.

Richie takes a deep breath. He told Steve to delete everything, but he’s seen enough movies to know trying to cover this up will be a good way for Eddie to find out on his own. He’s fucked up almost every important thing in his life, but this. This is the priority.

“So,” he says. “I have good news and bad news.” He gives Eddie the bad news first.

“Listen, baby,” he says later, dodging the last of the couch cushions. Like not just the small throw pillows but the _actual_ physical couch parts. “He said we have potential! We could be getting that big podcasting money!”

“I’m gonna fucking kill you, Tozier.” Eddie has stopped yelling it. He’s now just stating it as fact. He’s huffing from throwing every non-breakable object in Richie’s general direction. “You’re dead fucking meat.”

“I didn’t know! I didn’t know. I told him to delete it. _All of it._ ”

Eddie flushes even redder. “Did he… did you… ”

Richie stops holding his hands out like he’s trying to soothe a feral animal. “No, I didn’t… didn’t listen to any of it.” And then, because of the way Eddie gets redder, he adds, “I can’t stand listening to myself.”

“Oh.” Then Eddie draws himself up again. “I’m going to destroy that studio.”

“You can’t! You don’t want to know what lawyers Tom Hanks has at his disposal.”

“Fuck you, you don’t know Tom Hanks,” Eddie says. Then he says, “Tom Hanks does not have a drug addiction.” Then he says, “Tom Hanks does not have a _sex addiction_ , Richie.”

Richie shrugs. “Still waters run deep, man. We don’t judge in this household.”

Eddie deflates again, Richie’s stupidity cutting him at the knees. He covers his face with his hand, taking deep breaths. Richie can see him counting soundlessly.

“Okay,” he says after thirty, face impassive. “I need… an hour and twenty minutes to get over this. No… Yes. An hour and twenty minutes.”

Richie blinks. “Okay.”

“Get the fuck out of here then, I need the patio.” He points at Richie. “You’re sucking my dick later to make up for this.”

Richie is fairly certain he didn’t actually do anything wrong this time, but he nods. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get out of here.”

Richie leaves him to do whatever the fuck he has to do. With an hour and twenty minutes to spare, he pours himself another cup of coffee, brings his laptop into the bedroom, and writes cross-legged on the bed. Then he takes a hot shower, his mind blissfully blank.

It’s been an hour and nineteen minutes since Richie was dodging pillows, and he’s back in his sweatpants and flannel, towel-drying his hair, when he hears, “Hey! Come down here!”

He sticks his head out the bedroom door. “You okay?” he calls.

A pause and then, at a normal volume, but it carries because it’s big and echoey here and they’re alone, “I’m not fucking yelling across this dumb house at you, just come the fuck down.”

He heads downstairs and then, not seeing Eddie, goes out onto the patio. He stops in his tracks.

There’s Eddie, reclining on a hammock.

It’s a wide, netted thing held up by two moveable pillars, the kind you’d probably find at fancy beach resorts. It could probably fit three people across, but Eddie is dead center, reading what looks like one of Bill’s books. He’s even got a blanket over his feet.

“C’mon,” he says, glancing up. “I found it the other night in the garage when I… when I couldn’t sleep. We’re not going anywhere in this rain, these crazy ass roads aren’t safe.”

Slowly, as if in a dream, or as if lost in a memory, Richie moves to the hammock. He’s sure whatever look on his face is embarrassing as fuck, but he can’t help it. Eddie rolls his eyes at him, but he’s smiling, and Richie is so excited to suck his dick later.

There’s no graceful way to enter a hammock, particularly for a grown man. Eddie tries to scoot over so he’s not so central, but it barely works, and Richie rolls on quick, nearly crushing him.

“Ow, fuck,” Eddie gripes, sitting up. He waits for Richie to stretch his arm out, and then he lies back down, pulling up the blanket and curling up against Richie. He holds up the book. “Have you read any of these? Jesus, what the fuck kind of drugs was Bill on?”

Eddie starts to read, and in the most Eddie move imaginable, he does not opt to read aloud. It’s almost like Richie is there for decorative purposes, a very large hot water bottle to keep Eddie cozy on a rainy Monday morning. There’s literally no other use he’d rather have, though. He doesn’t need any other purpose. He’s just glad he doesn’t have feet in his face this time.

He shifts a little, turning his head to watch the rain again, wondering if he’ll see any birds. Eddie flips a page.

“Hey,” says Richie suddenly. “Is that a bear?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie says, not looking up from the book. “I’m not falling for that shit.”

The thing about bears is — they’ll leave you alone if you leave them alone. As long as they don’t smell food, of course. Richie keeps one eye on the bushes not twenty feet from their hammock, willing his body to stay calm and untensed, because then Eddie will definitely notice. The bear noses at the leaves, looking for berries.

“Honestly,” Eddie says, snorting. “It had to be cocaine or _something_. We gotta ask Bill.”

“Uh huh,” says Richie, still watching. “Probably.”

Eventually he loses sight of the bear, and can only hope it wandered away. The rain stops, and then starts again. A bird lands on the railing, and Richie makes a mental note as best he can of the size and markings to look it up later. He starts humming “Monday, Monday,” and this time he thinks he has the right tune. He keeps his cold feet pressed against Eddie’s calves until they’re as warm as he is, and Eddie doesn’t complain about it. At one point, Richie dozes, and he wakes up to find Eddie dozing next to him, too.

Richie realizes he’s waiting for a punchline. Waiting for the pratfall, for the rug to be pulled out from under him. For Eddie to knock him out of the hammock and laugh at where he’s sprawled on the floor. His whole life has been a series of punchlines. A comedian without any jokes. A man without any memories. A boy, defined by a love he won’t ever have. Voices, with nothing to say.

Eddie stirs beside him, nosing at his chin. He mumbles, “It’s Monday, right? I think there’s an episode of _The Bachelor_ on tonight.”

It’s taken Richie forty-one years to learn that punchlines don’t have to leave bruises. He laughs, and it carries over the rain and the mountain, scaring any wild animals away.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [PODFIC: first love / late spring](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22421011) by [reigenagain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reigenagain/pseuds/reigenagain), [skeilig_mp3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skeilig_mp3/pseuds/skeilig_mp3)




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